I am a Senior Lecturer in Politics at PoLIS. I joined the University of Bath in 2018. Before that, I was a Post-doctoral Fellow at The Ohio State University (2016-2018), an Istvan Deak Visiting Professor in East Central European Studies at Harriman Institute, Columbia University (Spring 2019), an Assistant Professor at the University of Mannheim (2012-2016), a Researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences (2011-2012), and a Fulbright fellow at the University of California, Irvine (2010-11). I received my PhD at Masaryk University (2012).

My research focuses on comparative political behavior, social movements, and the quality of democracy. I am primarily interested in how societal and state structures shape activism and preferences of individuals as well as of advocacy groups. I combine quantitative (multi-level modeling, comparative surveys, protest event analysis) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews, comparative case studies, case-control studies) approaches. Geographically, I focus on advanced industrialized societies, East Central Europe and Kurdistan. My book What kind of democracy? (Routledge 2017) examines how democratic institutions and culture based on inclusive contestation conception of democracy increase people’s non-electoral political activism.

Currently I do research on grassroots participatory democracy developed and practiced by the Kurdistan Freedom Movement in Bakur and Rojava and liberatory research methods.

I teach a variety of courses focused on research methods, comparative politics, and social movements. 

I am happy to supervise PhD dissertations focused on:

- citizen politics: political behavior, public opinion, protest 

- advocacy groups: social movements, interest groups

- democracy: democratic structures, democratic innovation  

- research methods: research design, mixed methods, and liberatory research