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I completed the DPhil in Economic History at the University of Oxford in August 2016. Upon graduation, I joined the Center of Research in the Economics of Development at the University of Namur as a post-doctoral researcher from 2016 to 2019. Since 2019, I have been a Lecturer in Economics at the School of Economics, University of Kent. 

Although I am originally trained as an economic historian, much of my research has a strong multidisciplinary bent. This is manifested in the types of questions I research, the nature of data I collect, and the range of academic communities I engage with—most notably political scientists and development studies scholars. I have an established track record publishing in top academic journals, generating significant research funding, presenting at prestigious conferences, seminars, and workshops, cultivating co-authorships with academics at high-ranking UK, US, and European Universities, and designing and delivering modules in development economics and economic history at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. I am also part of a select group of economic historians focusing on South Asia, which includes such renowned names as Professor Tirthankar Roy, Professor Bishnupriya Gupta, Professor James Fenske, Dr Latika Chaudhary and Professor Anand Swamy, who meet together periodically at the World Economic History Congress. Recently, I became a faculty fellow of the prestigious Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS) whose purpose is to foster contacts among leading economists, historians, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists working on the Muslim world.

My research encompasses fundamental questions in the ‘political economy of development’, as broadly construed in the development studies literature (Adam and Dercon 2009). These include, amongst others:

• whether historically embedded religious power impacts contemporary development;

• whether differential exposure to historic infrastructure influences development trajectories over the long run; 

• whether entrenched political dynasties matter for local economic development; and

• whether large-scale refugee migration and the widespread adoption of agricultural technologies shape core development outcomes like health and education in the long run 

I use an empirically rigorous, historically informed, and policy-relevant approach to addressing these questions. Specifically, my projects combine a deep understanding of the historical context with a rigorous empirical strategy to examine the long durée consequences of historic drivers of development. Moving beyond documenting first-order impacts, they also provide concrete mechanisms through which the impact of history persists over time. My more recent work also speaks directly to the idea of ‘historically contingent development’, whereby history’s impact remains dormant until it interacts with a subsequent event—what Cantoni and Yuchtman (2020) call a “time-varying shock”—that unlocks its influence over development.

Fields of interest: Economic History, Development Economics, Political Economy, Economics of Religion, Institutional Economics, Applied Econometrics, Migration Studies, Health Economics.