My research is informed by several years of immersive fieldwork in southern Albania, intensive language study in Albanian and Greek, and a global-level, multilingual team project I launched in 2020 called the Covid Border Accountability Project (COBAP). COBAP was launched during a Visiting Student Researcher position I held in Stanford University's Department of Political Science and the Immigration Policy Lab (IPL). Reflecting a mixed methods approach, I have archived state-level rights removals, physical relics of past schooling procedures, name data from cemeteries, state registries on families, and family testimonies--and combined them into two of the world's longest-spanning and most comprehensive databases on border policies and identity, respectively.
The results of my research are thus far published in the Nature Portfolio's high-impact, interdisciplinary journals (Scientific Reports and Scientific Data). I am currently developing a series of articles and a book project from my dissertation, The Politics of Identity Transmission in and after Communism. My work has been featured in the Atlantic, Healthline, the Conversation, and Al Jazeera, among others, and has received generous support from the American Political Science Association, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Boren Awards, and the U.S Department of State's Title VIII program. For a list of my publications and presentations, go here. For a list of my grants and awards, see my CV.
The thread between my research questions is that each has pressing contemporary implications and developments but requires hindsight and a substantial timeline of historical perspective to answer. To meet this dual demand, I employ innovative methods that combine creative research designs informed by ethnographic fieldwork, documentation of physical data (i.e., gravestones and monuments), and more than a century of family-level records in border regions. With a team of trained research assistants, I have transformed these diverse qualitative sources into a meticulously curated database optimized for advanced quantitative analysis, survey experiment design, and causal inference. Additionally, I developed a unique, data-driven measurement strategy to capture identity transformations over time rigorously with shifting cultural and historical contexts. I have furthermore released the COBAP data for public use via the Harvard Dataverse repository and will release my dissertation's cemetery and civil registry data for future research upon completion of my current book project on the divergent political paths of those families whose ancestors experienced repression versus recognition of their identities.
My most significant teaching experience is during a year-long, full-time position as a Visiting Lecturer at Emory University's Oxford College, where I taught freshman and sophomores Introduction to Political Science and advanced courses in political theory. Beyond the classroom, I have given lectures and led seminars in several non-traditional settings including a medium-security men's prison near Atlanta (Common Good Atlanta) and a women's rehabilitation center (Hope House, Stanford University's McCoy Center for Ethics).
I was born and raised in Tennessee, USA, to parents with Greek and Russian migration backgrounds, respectively. My family history motivated my interest in diaspora politics and the two-way intergenerational effects of migration decisions on family dynamics--that is, the impact on the descendants of those born to immigrants of the host country but also among those who remained. Before enrolling in my PhD program, I received a B.A. in political science from Emory University--during which I completed an honors thesis comparing my Greek-American family members with my Greece-based family members' perspectives on education. Through semi-structured interviews, I identified distinctive responses regarding the purpose of education and the choices made throughout one's life, with those in Greece seeing education as a lifelong journey and those in the U.S. describing it as a means to work.
After college, I took a year-long intermission from research to work as the 9th to 12th grade social sciences instructor for Shanti Bhavan Children's Project, a school designed to lift children out of poverty near Bangalore, India. This invaluable experience gave me first-hand knowledge of how generational cycles can be disrupted, the challenges of applying Western values in non-Western contexts, and a vast network of contacts I leverage in my research. I furthermore obtained a Master's degree in International Relations theory from the University of St Andrews, UK, in 2015, specializing in cross-cultural dialogue, the idea of "world order," and the public spaces in which transnational projects of the European Union are negotiated, built, and blocked. I developed my teaching skills at the University of Notre Dame's Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, which awarded me a certificate for my training and an Outstanding Teaching award for the seminar I led for the course Introduction to World Politics.
Aside from academic work, I enjoy immersive traveling, sunsets, meze, my dog, and writing short pieces for my blog.