Hi, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. I completed my PhD candidate at the Charles and Louise Travers department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was a Research Associate at the Center for the Politics of Development. Welcome to my website!

I study the links between social norms and political participation with a focus on gender and religious conservatism in South Asia. My dissertation-based book project, Domesticating Politics: How Religiously Conservative Parties Mobilize Women in India proposes a theory of norm-compliant mobilization to explain how the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wields social and religious norms to mobilize women. I also explore the wider implications of this mobilization for women’s agency in conservative parties and movements, as well as the paradox of democratic backsliding amidst rising political participation in India. In conjunction with this, a complementary research agenda examines the origins and spread of religious conservatism, how regressive norms can be transformed to foster inclusion, and the effects of inclusion on the marginalized and historically entrenched groups.

My research has been generously supported by the APSA-NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the APSA Centennial Center’s Women and Politics Fund, the Weiss Family Fund, the J-PAL Governance Initiative, the University of Notre Dame’s Global Religion Research Initiative, the University of Gothenburg’s Governance and Local Development Program, and UC Berkeley’s Graduate Division, Insitute of South Asia Studies, Center for Contemporary India, and Center for Right-Wing Studies.