Research Interests

I'm interested in what happens to international rules under pressure: when states leave them, when combatants ignore them, and when publics turn against them.

Treaty Exit and International Law

Beyond my book, I study how publics respond when governments withdraw from or violate international commitments, using survey experiments on the tradeoffs leaders face when treaties bind. I also study whether exit spreads across treaties and states, and how withdrawal affects the treaties and organizations left behind. Related work uses machine learning to measure legalization across more than 30,000 treaties, opening new questions about how treaty design shapes commitment, longevity, and effectiveness.

Health in Conflict and Crisis

I study the targeting of health care in armed conflict, including how attacks vary by type of facility and perpetrator, and what that means for humanitarian protection. This builds on earlier work with the Oppression and Resistance Lab on violence in the Syrian civil war.

International Institutions: Politics and Public Opinion

My work on international institutions looks at who supports international cooperation and why. With Valentina González-Rostani, I examine patterns in populist rhetoric. In working papers, I also study how childhood exposure to international civic programs shapes adults' support for international cooperation, as well as factors that influence local backlash and its trajectory. A separate project looks at the gap between formal and informal hierarchy within international organizations.

COVID-19 State Policy Project

With a team of political scientists and public health researchers, I documented US state social distancing policies in real time. The resulting database has been used by researchers, companies, and policymakers, including the IHME COVID-19 model. Related work finds that partisanship was the strongest predictor of when states adopted distancing policies.