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I am an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at James Madison University in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. My research is in comparative politics with an emphasis on political institutions and representation, Latin America, and gender and race. I completed my doctoral studies in comparative politics and methodology at the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Government in 2012.

My first book, published in 2018 with Cambridge University Press, examines how electoral rules, voters, and political parties intersect to affect women's descriptive representation and the quality of democracy in Brazil. Party Institutionalization and Women's Representation in Democratic Brazil builds on my dissertation research, in which I conducted 73 interviews and documentary research in eleven states across Brazil’s five regions (2008-2009). The twelve months of fieldwork was made possible by funding from the UT Department of Government and Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. Follow-up fieldwork in 2014 and 2015 was supported by James Madison University's College of Arts and Letters. I advance a multilevel database of several individual, party, and district-level characteristics of the 27,486 candidacies to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and Senate (1994-2014), and use it to explore the obstacles confronting female political aspirants in Brazil and the profiles most conducive to their electoral success. Findings from this analysis of the electoral performance of women support a revised understanding of the role of parties in electoral contexts with intraparty competition. In addition to illuminating the paths to power for women in Brazil, this research project speaks to broader questions concerning institutional change, gendered institutions, intersectionality, parties, and the quality of democracy.

My research and teaching interests include comparative politics, gender politics, Latin American politics, political parties and party systems, electoral systems and representation, political economy, development, quantitative methodology, research design, quality of democracy, participation, social movements, US-Latin American relations, and race and ethnicity.

I received my M.A. from the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at UT-Austin, with a concentration in Latin American politics and history. My undergraduate degree (political science) is from Louisiana State University, in my hometown of Baton Rouge. I spent one year at the College of Charleston (thanks to the National Student Exchange) studying the history, politics, and culture of the Americas, and have since traveled throughout the hemisphere. From 2012-2013, I served as visiting assistant professor of political science at SUNY Geneseo in the Finger Lakes region of New York. I moved to Virginia in 2013 to join the Department of Political Science at James Madison University in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.