I am a DPhil (PhD) candidate in politics at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations. My work, supervised by Dr Katerina Tertytchnaya, focuses on politics in Central Asia.

My doctoral work examines local governance, bureaucracy, and elite politics in authoritarian contexts. I use computational techniques to create and code new, detailed, and large datasets on elites’ and bureaucrats’ careers in Kazakhstan. With this data, I present evidence on just how elites come to hold power, how they use it, and how their actions shape their political futures. This work is funded by a four-year Economic and Social Research Council (UK government) studentship awarded by the Grand Union Doctoral Training Programme.

Current projects

In some of my doctoral research, I study how mid-ranking bureaucrats strategically use appointment powers to overcome delegation problems and build patronal ‘teams’ of loyal subordinates. Focusing on district bureaucrats in Kazakhstan, I use public procurement records to collect an original dataset of bureaucrats and their appointees, as well as a large corpus of bureaucrats’ biographies. A second paper examines subnational delegation. Who do national elites share power with? How do they judge their subordinates’ abilities? I collect biographic data on regional governors to show how Kazakhstan’s regime has manipulated their careers to build loyalty to the centre. Finally, with Kirill Melnikov and Eleonora Minaeva at the European University Institute, I am working on a project examining the impact of introducing local elections on the make-up of Kazakhstan’s local elites.

I am currently a research assistant on Dr Katerina Tertytchnaya’s ESRC funded project on non-violent repression. Previously, I worked as a research assistant on the UKRI/Horizon Europe-funded AUTHLIB project, Professor Lenka Buštíková’s work on illiberalism in Ukraine, and the Oxford University Economic Recovery Project at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

Other work

Outside of academia, I have experience providing open source methods and Russian-language consulting for research and analysis projects related to the former Soviet Union. Please contact me to discuss my availability.