Welcome!

Hello!

I am currently a fifth-year PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Kentucky. In Fall 2025, I will start as the inaugural Bingham Postdoctoral Teacher-Scholar at Transylvania University. My research focuses on identity politics, political psychology and behavior, and political sociology. Substantively, I focus my research on how people’s lived experiences, both inter- and intragroup, shape their political behaviors, beliefs, and attachments. Methodologically, I employ both quantitative and qualitative methods to improve how researchers study the effects of identity on the individual-level and elite-level. This includes research using psychometrics, Bayesian model averaging, machine learning, and qualitative data collection and analysis methods.

My dissertation specifically investigates LGBTQ people’s sense of linked fate as a way to broaden our understanding of this concept and expand its theoretical framework. I use a combination of survey, phenomenological, and psychometric techniques to explore (1) how LGBTQ people experience a sense of linked fate, (2) the experiential and affective mechanisms driving LGBTQ people’s sense of linked fate, and (3) develop a novel, multidimensional measure to assess LGBTQ people’s sense of linked fate.

In addition to my dissertation, my other current projects investigate how constituent-level identity (including White identity) shapes state and local elites’ legislative behavior, the causal relationship between minority stress and LGBTQ people’s linked fate, and how social and environmental factors shape TGNC people’s outness.