I am an Associate Professor (Docent) at the Department of Political Science, Lund University, and a research fellow at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (Kungl. Vitterhetsakademien). I am also the PI (with Oriol Sabaté) for the project “The Politics of State Building: Studying Investments in State Capacity through Legislative Debates”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2022-2025).
Prior to this, I was a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with the project “State-Making and the Origins of Global Order in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond” (STANCE) also at Lund University.
My research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics, political development, and democratic theory, with regional specializations on the politics of Latin America and Western Europe.
I am particularly interested in the relationship between democracy and development. Most of my work to this date can be grouped under three general topics:
- processes of state formation in the Atlantic World;
- the development of deliberative systems from a historical institutionalist perspective; and
- the tensions between state sovereignty and the rights of non-citizens.
My research has been published in journals such as Citizenship Studies, Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, Politics & Society, and the Review of International Organizations. A full list of my publications is available here.
I moonlight as a novelist. My first book of fiction, La frase negra, was published by Ediciones ERA in Mexico in 2007.