Biography

Prior to joining the European University Institute as a Max Weber Fellow I was a graduate student and Assistant Instructor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. There I completed my doctoral dissertation, ‘Why the Iranian Revolution was Non-violent: Internationalized Social Change and the Iron Cage of Liberalism’, under the guidance of Maya Charrad and Les Kurtz.
For the past two years I have been teaching a self-designed course entitled, ‘Revolution, Power, & Non-violence’ at UT.
I graduated summa cum laude from the University of Charleston with a B.A. in Philosophy and English, and earned an M.A. in Rhetoric from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
My research interests include revolutions, social movements, non-violent social change, human rights, comparative history and politics, and general issues of peace and conflict.
To date, my research has focused specifically on revolutionary social movements that intentionally eschew violent tactics of struggle in favour of non-violent methods, such as strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts.
In particular, I am interested in understanding why the nature of revolutions has changed so drastically, beginning in the late 1970s, and how non-violent challengers have been able to remove seemingly powerful dictators.
I have argued that this development is a consequence of structural factors on the international level combined with strategic decisions made by revolutionary leaders and participants.