I am a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. I received my PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2022. My research focuses on land politics and the role of local governments in Africa. Primarily, I am interested in the political economy of land titling, redistribution and land-based conflict at the local level, but I have also studied accountability and impeachments, elections, gender representation in local governments and the politics of identity.

In my dissertation and book project, ‘The Price of Redistribution: Local Markets and Agriculture in South Africa's Land Reform Program’ (Honourable Mention for the 2023 Lynne Rienner APCG Best Dissertation Prize in African Politics), I focus on post-apartheid land redistribution and restitution in South Africa. I conducted fieldwork in South Africa from September 2019 until March 2020, remotely from April 2020-June 2020 and returned in the spring of 2022. I argue that to understand contemporary, market-based land redistribution outcomes, one must come to grips with a field of diverse and dynamic agricultural organisations. Depending on whether these are liberalised or centralised, one will see differences in land redistribution outcomes.

Much of my past work has been done in Kenya, where I wrote my masters dissertation looking at decentralisation in the context of historical land conflict. I have also studied land redistribution and conflict in Southern Africa and election violence in Liberia.   

Before all this: I was born and grew up in Toronto, where I did my BA at the University of Toronto in Peace and Conflict Studies. I then completed an MPhil in Politics (Comparative Government) at University College, Oxford. After, I worked at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (Nairobi) and Generations for Peace (Amman and Skopje) before coming to Cornell. In South Africa, I am affiliated with the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand. I am also affiliated with the Strathmore Law School in Nairobi for my research. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada generously supports my research through a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.