I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Boston University.

I am currently a Research Fellow at the Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs (CURA) and a Graduate Student Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Science (CISS).

I study state-building and religious authority in Muslim-majority countries, with a focus on South and Southeast Asia. My dissertation project asks: Under what conditions do religious education providers accept state oversight?

In Pakistan and Indonesia, Islamic schools have long operated as parallel sites of moral and political formation, shaping how ordinary people understand law, obligation, and who has the right to govern. Yet the two states have had strikingly different experiences trying to bring those institutions under state oversight. I am interested in what that divergence reveals about the limits of how political scientists think about state power and about what it means to govern a society in which the state was not the only, or even the primary, architect of political order.

My work has appeared in outlets such as Dawn and Reading Religion. My work has been supported by SEASSI and CURA.