I am a Researcher in the Department of Government at Uppsala University, and an Associate Professor of Politics at University of San Francisco. I use ethnography, focus groups, and surveys to examine the political conditions under which democratic activity and accountability develop in poor urban communities, specifically in Africa. I am an Associate with the Governance and Local Development Institute (GLD) at the University of Gothenburg, and in 2022-23, was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. I discuss my research on this episode of SCAS Talks.

I am the PI for the “Building Sustainable Neighborhoods in African Cities” project (Formas 2024-26) and co-leading “Emerging Cities”, a Swedish Research Council-funded research environment that examines political change and local governance in secondary cities (2023-27). I am a Co-I on the “Political Transformation in African Cities (PACE)” project supported by the Research Council of Norway (2021-24).

My research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation,  University of Wisconsin, and USF. I was a Research Associate at the Center for Democratic Development in Ghana in 2012. I received my PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the department of political science in 2014. During the academic year 2014-15, I was a Visiting Lecturer of Politics at Bates College. In 2016, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, working with the Center for Sustainable Urban Development. I curate the weekly news bulletin This Week in Africa.

Prior to graduate school, I graduated with honors from Northwestern University and served as a Program Coordinator for the Illinois Education Foundation (now One Million Degrees).

Check out my CV and my Google Scholar profile.