I research migration governance in both the USA and Europe, focusing especially on issues of security, irregular migration, and state logics of migration control. In very broad terms, I research why policy decision-makers advance certain approaches to governing migration as ones that make sense to them, producing certain dominant ways of governing this extremely complex policy space. I come to these questions from a politics and public policy background.
I'm currently at the University of Lincoln, where I am associate professor of international politics. I am leading the British Academy-funded international, interdisciplinary project “Colonialism and Migration in Global Perspective,” helping to forge a global account of how the legacies of colonialism have influenced migration governance today. With the Seeing “Illegal” Immigrants project, I have researched the way the British state has "seen" unauthorized immigrants. I earned my PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Edinburgh, where I completed a project on the immigration politics of the state of Arizona, and where I also earned my master's degree as a Fulbright Scholar.
I teach undergraduate and masters-level courses in international relations, migration politics, and U.S. politics. Outside of academia, I've also worked with think tank and non-profit groups in Arizona to draft analyses and white papers. My UK research has been cited in the report of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review.
Further back, I was a political speechwriter -- I worked in the Arizona Governor's Office, and as a political appointee, I served as speechwriter to the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama Administration.
You can also take a look at my University of Lincoln staff page or my CV.