I am the Claire Tow Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. I am also the Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University.

My research agenda is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing both theoretically and methodologically from across the social sciences. I conduct comparative work on the relationships between illicit global economies, organized crime, and democracy and citizenship in the developing world.

In my first book, Cities, Business and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2016), I analyzed how the relationships between city mayors, business interests, and criminal organizations shape the ways in which major developing world cities respond to the challenge of urban violence. In my second book, Resisting Extortion: Victims, Criminals, and States in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, 2022), I tackle the following question: Why do victims resist similar forms of criminal victimization in contrasting ways? In this book I use the widespread but understudied phenomenon of criminal extortion in Latin America to introduce resistance to criminal victimization into the emerging research on the politics of crime.

My forthcoming book, Citizens, Criminals, and Claim-making for Public Goods in Latin America, asks how criminal governance impacts the ways that citizens and communities make demands on the state for basic but fundamental public goods. This monograph is part of a broader ongoing project in peripheral neighborhoods across Mexico City.

My research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Open Society Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Fulbright Program, among others.