I am a Professor in Comparative Politics in the department of Political Science and the department's Associate Chair. After majoring in International Studies at the Jackson School at the University of Washington, I received my Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, and then began working at the University of Kentucky.

I am working to expand opportunities for international education here at UK. I was awarded a 3-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education to develop a consortium that will bring together 4 academic departments here at UK and Bluegrass Community and Technical College, to offer students a guarantee of a high-impact, internationally-oriented experience as part of their degree.  In the past I have led study abroad programs to Costa Rica and Spain.

I am also an active researcher. My book, Electoral Protest and Democracy in the Developing World, with Cambridge University Press examines election-related protests and their consequences for democracy in developing countries. For this project I constructed an original data set of election-related protest and reform throughout the developing world for a thirty year period.

In my next book, which will be published with Oxford University Press in 2023, my co-author and I offer a strategic explanation for the phenomenon of Legislative Brawls--when legislators get in physical fights during the course of their work as representatives. Our research focuses primarily on brawling in Taiwan and Ukraine and has been featured in an article in the Journal of Politics.

I have also published work on democracy and perceptions of fraud and corruption that has appeared in journals such as International Organization, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, and Journal of Experimental Political Science. I am currently co-editing a handbook on Gender and Corruption in Democracies.