Welcome!

I am spending the 2024-25 year as a postdoctoral fellow with the Global Forum on Democracy and Development in its Colombo, Sri Lanka hub, housed at the Social Scientists' Association. I am an incoming (July 2025) Assistant Professor in Cornell University’s Department of Government, where I am affiliated with the South Asia Program. I received my Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. My work spans South Asia and Mexico. I utilize causal inference methods (particularly field experiments and quasi-experimental methods), in my research on traditional governance and gender. I also work closely with policymakers in the field.

In my research, I ask how key institutions can intervene to increase the political agency of women and indigenous populations, who are systematically excluded from state politics around the globe. To this end, the focus of my book project is on traditional governance.

In my job market paper, I asked how states consolidate control in weak areas, encouraging citizens to adopt their gender-equitable judicial institutions instead of traditional alternatives. The former Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan are home to an ongoing historic state expansion effort to introduce formal courts and bring the area beneath the Supreme Court's jurisdiction. I used a novel experiment with 2,100 men and women to assess how perceptions of gendered distributional consequences impact buy-in to the state judiciary. My results showed evidence of a backlash effect, where upsetting existing patriarchal power dynamics eclipses the overall benefits brought by a new formal institution. This suggests a dilemma for states as they attempt to consolidate control in areas of limited statehood, where the distributive consequences of state-building initiatives actually weaken state legitimacy.

My research also considers:

• how traditional governance structures insulate indigenous communities from cartel violence in Mexico

• how logistical decisions by election bureaucrats can impact voting rates of women in Pakistan,

• how party elites can use messaging to strategically recruit a more diverse base of rank-and-file party workers in India,

• and how initiatives to improve women's transport mobility impact their political and labor force participation.

I co-organized WPESA, the Workshop on the Political Economy of South Asia.  At Stanford, I was a member of the PovGov and ID2 labs. 

View CV

Contact me: sft35(at)cornell(dot)edu