Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin. I research political parties, representation, elections and text-as-data methods.

As co-PI of the CONSTRUCT project, I investigate whether, through their communication with voters, political parties and politicians actually construct the identities of the social groups they represent, rather than simply appealing to existing identities or groups (2025-2029).

I received my PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University in August 2021.

In 2026, I was a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, Department of Political Science, School of Government. I worked on the TWICEASGOOD project that examines the “gender penalty” faced by women candidates accounting for their everyday experiences on the campaign trail and asks whether women are working “twice as hard” to achieve similar levels of electoral success.

From 2023 to 2025 I held a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Communication Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Under a HorizonEurope Individual Marie Curie Postdoctoral Grant, I worked on the GAPREP project that investigates the relationship between group appeals and political representation (2023-2025).

From 2021 to 2023 I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin, School of Politics and International Relations, working with WP6 of the Horizon2020 Observatory of Political Texts in European Democracies—A European Research Infrastructure (OPTED) Project.

My research focuses on comparative European party politics, group appeals, political representation, intra-party candidate selection, and text-as-data, motivated by questions of the representative relationship between political parties and voters as a core aspect of modern democracies. Focusing on how political parties as collective bodies of representation go about shaping their relationship with society, I use computational text analysis methods to examine patterns of group-based appeals in parties’ election materials over time and across countries.

Here you can find more about my research, the GAPREP project, publications and data.

Here you can also find my Google Scholar profile, ORCID and GitHub pages.