Bio

I am a political scientist interested in the processes of state- and nation-building,  political development, and diaspora policy. My work contributes to our understanding of states’ management of diversity that may originate from national minorities, immigrants, diasporas, or refugees. I am particularly interested in the role of decision makers’ perceptions about foreign involvement in their domestic affairs and the impact these perceptions have on the planning and implementation of state policies. CV

After completing my Ph.D. in political science at Yale University in 2008, I joined the faculty at the department of political science at George Washington University. Here I teach undergraduate courses on Nationalism, Patriotism, and European Integration, and graduate courses on Nation-Building in the Balkans, Nationalism and Nation-Building, and Qualitative Research Methods. For 2008-09 and 2011-12 academic years, I was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

My book, The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012 and won The Peter Katzenstein Book Prize for the best first book on International Relations, Comparative Politics, or Political Economy in 2013, the 2014 European Studies Book Award by the Council for European Studies which honors the best first book on any subject in European Studies published within a two-year period, and an honorable mention by the Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies Committee of Association for the Study of Nationalities in 2014.

I have co-edited two volumes, Enemies Within: The Global Politics of Fifth Columns (Oxford University Press, 2022; w/ Scott Radnitz) and The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics (Routledge, 2022; w/ Alexandra Délano Alonso). My forthcoming book, co-authored with Maya Tudor, is entitled Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities (Cambridge University Press).

My work has also been published in the Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Security Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Territory, Politics, Governance, Nations and Nationalism, Social Science Quarterly, Nationalities Papers, Ethnopolitics, as well as various edited volumes.

Turning to service, I served as Associate Dean for Research at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs  during 2017-18. Since 2018, I am editor-in-chief of Nationalities Papers, a peer-reviewed journal published by Cambridge University Press for the Association for the Study of Nationalities. I have been serving as a member of the Board of Directors of ASN since 2011. I am also a member of the editorial board of Diaspora Studies as well as the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. From 2019 to 2021, I served as Chair of the Council for European Studies Research Network on “Historical Study of States and Regimes“. 

As part of my public engagement activity, beyond writing opinion pieces mainly for Foreign Affairs and the Washington Post‘s Blog the Monkey Cage, I recently gave a TedX talk @tedxfoggybottom where I described the process of nation-building through my family history.

I am producing a podcast, together with Andrew Thompson, entitled American Constitutive Stories. Our goal is to create a space where Americans from different walks of life can share their understanding of their national identity, how it relates to other identities, who they think to be American heroes, and what they see as the most promising connecting tissue of our society in the future. 

Finally, I also completed a political documentary entitled, Searching for Andreas: Political Leadership in Times of Crisis. The film premiered at the 20th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, won two awards at the International Documentary Festival of Ierapetra and was also screened at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC and the 2021 World Congress of Political Science of the International Political Science Association.