I am an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, Yale University.  I am also a non-resident visiting scholar at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania and a non-resident fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Research Center, Lahore University of Management Sciences. My research and teaching focus on local governance, urban politics, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on South Asia and India in particular. 

My first book, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India's Urban Slums (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series, 2020), accounts for the uneven success of India's slum residents in demanding and securing essential public services from the state. The project draws on more than two years of fieldwork in the north Indian cities of Jaipur, Rajasthan and Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Demanding Development won the 2021 Dennis Judd Best Book Award from the Urban and Local Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The doctoral dissertation on which Demanding Development is based also won three awards, including APSA's Gabriel A. Almond Award for best dissertation in comparative politics. 

My second book (co-authored with Tariq Thachil), Migrants and Machine Politics: How India's Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness, was published by Princeton University Press in 2023, in the Princeton Studies in Political Behavior Series. Migrants and Machine Politics won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, the Francine Frankel Prize from the South Asia Section of APSA, the Giovanni Sartori Book Award from the Qualitative and Mixed-Methods Research Section of APSA, the Best Book Award from the Experimental Research Section of APSA, and Honorable Mention, Luebbert Best Book Award from the Comparative Politics Section of APSA.  

My research on urban governance and development appears in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, World Development, and World Politics. 

During the 2022-2023 academic year, I was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in the Social Sustainability and Inclusion Global Practice at the World Bank.