Born in North Carolina, I grew up between upstate New York and Istanbul, Turkey. After graduating from Reed College, I taught English at a public high school in France, helped produce the New Orleans Jazz Festival and the Contemporary Istanbul Art Festival, served as a medical interpreter in New York City's public hospitals, and taught Turkish in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and joined the Political Science department at Swarthmore College that year. Between 2018 - 2020, I served as Director of the Europe Regional Program at the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I live in West Philadelphia.