I’m a researcher interested in civil-society under authoritarianism, and I received my PhD from Princeton University’s Politics Department. I’m the Assistant Director of Writing and Research at UCSD’s 21st Century China center, and I previously worked as a Postdoctoral Lecturer with the Princeton Writing Program, where I taught a freshman writing seminar that teaches basic research skills and helps student interrogate issues of governance. My dissertation and book project studies religion and politics under authoritarianism, with a focus on China.  I seek to understand how states attempt to pacify and corral potentially restive forces within society, and the extent to which groups within society are able to subvert the state’s aims. My book project examines the Chinese Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the only state sanctioned Protestant organization in China. It examines how the state attempts to use this organization to control religious life and how believers subvert these aims. I earned my BA at Stanford University with a major in International Relations.