I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where I specialize in racial and ethnic politics, political psychology, political behavior, and survey and experimental methods.
My research asks how Black Americans sustain investment in a democracy that has repeatedly excluded them. My current book project, Red, White, and Black: What Black Participation Teaches Us About American Democracy, develops Democratic Stewardship — a theory and validated psychometric measure of how Black Americans diagnose exclusion, understand obligation across generations, and attach democratic meaning to participation. My work has been supported by a three-wave national panel survey fielded with YouGov across the 2026 election cycle, and my measurement-validation article on the Democratic Stewardship Scale is under review at Political Psychology. You can find my work in Advances in Political Psychology.
My teaching reflects the same commitment to democratic participation that animates my research. At UMBC, I have taught Introduction to American Government and Politics, African American Politics, and a Race and Film seminar, using experiential learning and structured mentorship to help students engage critically with the political world around them.
I earned my Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and was previously a Predoctoral Associate of Research in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. I comment regularly on race and politics for the Baltimore Banner and am active in the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.
