I am a political sociologist studying political participation, gender, and migration under authoritarianism. My dissertation documents a reversal of the conventional gender gap in authoritarian emigrations — women sustain political activism at higher rates than men — and traces it to the distribution of moral responsibility rather than to resources or prior activism. A second strand asks how origin states continue to govern citizens who have left: through passports, documents, and consular access, they retain leverage that chills the most visible forms of participation long before anyone is targeted.
I work primarily with panel and experimental designs — multi-wave surveys, conjoint experiments, difference-in-differences, multilevel models across host countries — combined with in-depth interviews, which I use to identify mechanisms closed-ended instruments miss. My empirical core is the post-2022 Russian emigration, but the questions are comparative: they concern any authoritarian state governing a large and legally dependent diaspora abroad.
I am completing my PhD in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore under the supervision of Martín Portos and Lorenzo Zamponi. In 2026 I was a Visiting Research Fellow at Waseda University and the University of Tokyo; from January 2027 I will be a Visiting Fellow at the Davis Center, Harvard University.
I am a Co-Investigator of OutRush, a five-wave panel of more than 30,000 observations from Russian emigrants in over 100 countries, and of Democracy in Exile (DemEx). I lead The Science of Dreams, on wartime dream narratives as evidence about fear and political subjectivity under authoritarianism.
Recent work — Citizenship as Leverage · Micromobilizing Emotion · all publications