​​I am Associate Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College as well as a faculty committee member of Peace and Conflict Studies. 

My research examines the politics of civilian protection and the construction of legitimacy in global governance, focusing on the interplay between international institutions, local agency, and frontline practice. I have conducted fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Burundi, Central African Republic, Kenya, Syria, and Iraq. I am the author of Taking Sides in Peacekeeping: Impartiality and the Future of the United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2016), several academic journal articles, and co-editor of Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings: A Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2023). For more information, please visit the publications and research project tabs.

Before coming to Swarthmore, I taught at the University of Oxford where I was the Rose Research Fellow in International Relations (Lady Margaret Hall) and Associate Faculty at the Blavatnik School of Government. In 2024–2025, I was the J.W. McConnell Visiting Scholar at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. I have also been a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University and the International Peace Institute (IPI), an Action Canada Public Policy Fellow, and a Sauvé Scholar at McGill University. From 2016-2019, I was a research collaborator on the European Research Council (€ 2.4 million) project: “Individualisation of War: Reconfiguring the Morality, Law, and Politics of Armed Conflict” at the European University Institute.

My research has been supported by the John Templeton Foundation, European Research Council, Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Government of Canada, British Council, and the Australian Government’s Civil-Military Center. Outside of academia, I have worked as a consultant for the United Nations, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Refugee Studies Center (University of Oxford), the Danish Refugee Council, and Oxford Analytica. I am an elected fellow of the Rift Valley Institute, an independent, non-profit organization working in eastern and central Africa to bring local knowledge to bear on social, political, and economic development, and I serve as a member of the 2025-2029 International Research Working Group on the Protection of Civilians and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence at the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA).

I earned my MPhil and DPhil (Phd) from the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College), and my A.B. from Brown University.

I am a proud Canadian, lover of wild spaces, and mom of three.