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I am interested in how social boundaries intertwine with political development and institutional change to facilitate opportunities for exclusion and violence. 

Primarily, I use historical and quantitative methods to study the social construction of race and ethnicity through institutions and how this links with ongoing processes of state formation. The rest of my work takes up social and institutional change more broadly, through investigating the contexts and processes that promote change.

My current and recent work includes investigations of medieval expulsions of Jews from German cities, the early modern diffusion of new ideas about witchcraft and the incidence of witch trials, how organizational leaders build consensus and shared vision for systemic change, and the connections between ethnoreligious social structural cleavages, political mobilization, and symbolic boundaries.

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