Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Boston College. My research bridges collective behavior and social movements, political sociology, organizational studies, computational social science, and quantitative methods, with a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

At the heart of my work is understanding how contentious politics emerge from the strategic interactions of diverse actors, state institutions, oil companies as organizational actors, civil society organizations, and local communities. My dissertation introduces petroprotest, protests concerning the production, consumption, or impacts of oil and gas. It develops the petro field framework, a contested arena where states, companies, and communities continually renegotiate the stakes, rules, and meanings of oil. My work draws on field theory to examine how corporate governance structures, ownership arrangements (National Oil Companies versus International Oil Companies), and spatial proximity to oil infrastructure shape protest dynamics.

Methodologically, I use computational text analysis, geospatial modeling, survey experiments, regression analysis, and comparative-historical analysis to study sociopolitical and contentious dynamics. In Iraq, I designed and fielded two original surveys, a national survey of 750+ respondents across all 18 governorates and a Basra city survey of 500 respondents that adds questions on proximity to oil infrastructure. I built Petroprotest, a dataset of 8000+ oil-related protest events across 160 countries, and the Islamic Republic Martyrs Dataset, which covers over 214,000 individuals from Iran’s Sacred Defense period.

I have published research in Comparative Political Studies, The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, Alzheimer’s Disease & Associated Disorders, and Research on Aging. The gerontology and Alzheimer’s papers come from my time as a research assistant on an NIH-funded cognitive aging project, separate from the dissertation work described above. Additional papers are under review at American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, American Political Science Review, The Journal of Development Studies, Social Problems, and Social Forces, with a paper at Perspectives on Politics currently in revise and resubmit. My policy analyses have appeared in Foreign Affairs and Middle East Report Online (MERIP).

Please find my full CV here (last updated August 2026).