How do elites maintain power over racially diverse populations? I investigate this question within the historical U.S., employing archival data and game theoretic models to analyze how White Southerners have repressed Black Southerners. 

My book project, How Elites Maintained Power in the Antebellum South, analyzes the expansive system by which enslavers repressed and extracted labor from enslaved Americans. In a series of game theoretic models, I describe the costs enslavers incurred to repress escape and the limitations of those individual investments. Model results show that public systems of policing benefited enslavers; critically, however, effective public policing required manpower that enslavers were unable or unwilling to supply. My job market paper then ask how Southern elites encouraged non-slaveholding whites to participate in that policing. To answer this question, I construct a novel historical dataset on North Carolina school funds. I find that elites targeted policy benefits to non-elites when and where elites most demanded policing. 

My research has most recently been published in the Journal of Historical Political Economy and is forthcoming in Studies in American Political Development. My dissertation, which is the basis for the book project, received the 2025 Best Dissertation Award from the APSA American Political Economy Section.