Profile
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). My research interests centers around the fields of comparative politics and historical political economy. In particular, my research centers around questions such as the origins of the modern state, the causes and consequences of state capacity, and the evolution of cultural norms and values.
I am currently part of the LEGACIES project, led by Professor Charles Butcher and funded by the European Research Council. The project is a large scale effort to identify and map historical states from 1750–1920. By geocoding historical atlases, we collect multiple cartograhpic representations of each historical state, and by overlaying these we estimate the likelihood of a particular historical state being present at any given location.
Historical state-building has been central to much of my research. In my PhD project, On the Origins of the Modern State, I studied early state formation in medieval and early modern Europe. Using an original data set on the ownership histories of more than 5,000 castles across Europe, I trace the origins of the modern state and show how specific historical events such as the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation impacted the development of states.
Before coming to NTNU, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, Stanford University (funded by the Carlsberg Foundation), exploring the impact of state formation on the evolution of cultural norms. The OriGen project, which is still ongoing, studies the origins and persistence of traditional (patriarchal) gender norms. The central question guiding this project is when and under what conditions cultural norms and values, such as those related to gender, emerge and persist. The project draws on research across social science disciplines and ultimately seeks to model the evolution of cultural norms and their interactions with political institutions. For instance, in one paper, I explore how the rise of early states promoted patriarchal gender norms.
Methodologically, I rely mostly on quantitative methods, especially causal inference in non-experimental settings, as well as modern data science tools such as geographical information systems (GIS) and machine-learning to measure and study important concepts in historical political economy and comparative politics. For instance, one paper develops a new measure of sub-national state capacity using geo-coded data and machine learning. Another project seeks to track anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and the transnational spread of radical right movements using large language models to classify political videos on YouTube.
You can find out more about my work under Research and on my academic CV. If you have any questions or want to know more, feel free to email me.