Hello!

I am an Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, where I am the Director of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy.

I am also the co-founder and convener of the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative (IGLI), an effort to catalyze research, education, and programming aimed at elevating and amplifying the work that women and gender non-conforming activists are doing at the grassroots to advance peace, democracy, and human rights across the world. We regularly host summits and institutes for activists, academics, community members, and more as part of IGLI — for instance, check out our 2024 Feminist Peace Summit, or take a look at our 2023-24 Annual Report. We also released a podcast as part of IGLI in 2023, and will release a Spanish-language mini season in early 2025. For this work, I received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Biden in 2025, which is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to early career researchers. Also as part of IGLI, we co-authored the Feminist Peace Playbook with the Feminist Peace Initiative in 2025.

My academic research focuses on war, gender, activism, and politics. My first book, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Cambridge University Press 2018), investigated the impact of mass violence on women's political mobilization. My second book project, which is nearing completion, is tentatively titled “There Are Things You Cannot Choke in Blood” (a quote from Camus). It features seven stories of care and creativity from seven cases of mass atrocities, including stories about the theater scene in Sarajevo during the siege, the power of music in Aleppo, and the importance of cooking to care for displaced Tamil women in Sri Lanka.

Together with Milli Lake (LSE), my current research critically examines women’s empowerment interventions after war. With an incredible collective of women, we run the Women’s Rights After War (WRAW) Project, which aims to evaluate how women’s empowerment initiatives shape different women’s lives. Through this project, we are also exploring how we can expand our understandings of women’s experiences during and after violence through mediums other than writing — we are in awe of the dancers, singers, and artists that work on these same topics and have so much to teach us. Check out our digital archive here.

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