I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Russian Politics at University College London in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
I am also currently an Associate Fellow at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs) in the Russia and Eurasia Programme; a Senior Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, in the Laboratory for Regional Political Studies; and a National Committee member of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies.
I was previously the Herbert Nicholas Junior Research Fellow in Politics at New College, University of Oxford.
In 2020, I was awarded a Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. In 2019, I was a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University. In 2018, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki.
I am interested in what legislatures do in authoritarian regimes. Specifically, my current research examines how executive actors with divergent policy preferences use legislative institutions to reconcile conflicts in the policy-making process. I focus on Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union. My doctoral dissertation on this topic, defended at the University of Oxford, was awarded the Political Studies Association's 2016 Walter Bagehot Prize for the best dissertation in the field of Government and Public Administration.
In 2019, I was awarded a Rising Star Engagement Award by the British Academy for a project bringing together early career political scientists to study moments of parliamentary closure around the world.
My other research interests include: the policy-making process for criminal law in the former Soviet Union; Russian regional politics; and budgeting dynamics in non-democratic states. I use a mixture of qualitative and quantitative techniques in my research, and am particularly interested in developing methods for their combination when studying authoritarian regimes.
I have published research articles in Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, Russian Politics, Post-Communist Economies, and the Journal of Legislative Studies.
I have also published pieces in general-readership publications, including Newsweek, The Telegraph, The Washington Post 'Monkey Cage', Vedomosti, The Moscow Times, The Conversation, and Business Insider. And I've provided commentary for pieces published in places like Bloomberg Opinion, CNN, The Times, Reuters, BBC News Russian, BBC Mundo, Foreign Policy, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Al Jazeera, TIME, and The New Republic – and have appeared on Al Jazeera, France 24, Times Radio, LBC, BBC Radio London, Euronews, ABC Radio National, and Channel News Asia.
Google Scholar profile
