About Me

Credit: Maija Kettunen / Fulbright Finland

I graduated from Reed College in 2006 with a Bachelors of Arts degree in Political Science. I spent my junior year abroad at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. After graduation I worked at the Early Voting Information Center (also housed at Reed) first as a research associate and, later, as research director. While at EVIC I co-authored two studies of convenience voting reforms and a literature review of the subject. At the same time I was also the coordinator of the Public Policy Lecture Series at Reed.

I started a doctoral program at the University of California, Irvine in Political Science in 2008. While at UCI I was a William Podlich Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy. I completed a Masters degree in 2010. I defended my dissertation Redistricting in the United States: Inputs, Institutions, and Outcomes in 2013. Shortly thereafter I joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as a post-doctoral fellow within the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program. I was part of an interdisciplinary team jointly conducting research on personal autonomy. That research agenda was generously supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

During the 2016-2017 academic year I was the Fulbright-University of Tampere Scholar at the University of Tampere in Finland. While in residence at Tampere I taught courses on American and comparative politics and conducted research on comparative voting behavior. I also, as you can see from the picture above, gave a number of public lectures to Finnish audiences on topics related to American politics and the 2016 election. I am currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Irvine. and I am working on a book-length project on voter turnout in the United States.