I am a political scientist and Associate Professor in International Studies at UW. My research and teaching focus on Indian politics and political economy, energy studies, mining politics, labor in the informal sector, development studies, the history of capitalism, and the politics of yoga. My first book, Electrifying India (Stanford, 2014), examines the politics of electrification in India from the decade before independence until the early 2000s. Using a variety of qualitative data I argue that subnational political economic dynamics shaped the evolution of the Indian electric grid, helping to explain why access to energy remains spatially uneven across India, where several hundred million citizens are not connected to the grid. 

I am currently working on three research projects. The first investigates the socio-political consequences of extractive industrialization in India’s mining belt. A second project, a collaboration with Christian L. Novetzke, focuses on the multiple ways that yoga intersects with politics in the contemporary moment, from its centrality to debates about secularism and religion, to what it might offer as a political theory akin to concepts of political theology. My newest research focuses on the politics of labor and entrepreunerialism in India’s informal sector.