Hello! I am an Assistant Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. My work focuses broadly on how racial and ethnic identities affect social attitudes and behavior, with a main regional emphasis in East Africa. I am especially interested in understanding and improving measurement tools for these purposes. 

My primary lines of research focus on internalized racism, an individual-level psychological phenomenon wherein members of disadvantaged racial groups implicitly or explicitly adopt racist attitudes, ideologies, and behaviors perpetuated by dominant racial power structures. African scholars and activists repeatedly emphasize internalized racism as a pervasive, persistent, and pernicious legacy of colonial rule, but existing political science literature overlooks this phenomenon as explanation for underdevelopment. My research emphasizes concerns that African scholars and activists raise while applying contemporary social science methodologies for large scale measurement and causal identification in an ethically sensitive manner. 

My research is supported by the National Science Foundation. Additional collaborative projects are funded by the Center for Effective Global Action, the National Opinion Research Center, and UCLA's Bendari Kindness Institute. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles and served as a postdoctoral fellow in Global Development at Georgia Tech.

Photographs: Performance of Ngaahika Ndeenda at the Kenyan National Theater (banner). Hamilton headshot by Kris Kuganathan & Nisha Mehta (upper left). Art installation at Eastlands Library, Nairobi (lower left).