I am Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA. I study how ordinary people navigate war and genocide: why some participate in violence, others resist, and many look away. My research shows that these choices depend less on hatred or ideology than we tend to assume and more on how people classify one another, how those classifications shift under pressure, and how social relationships shape behavior. Drawing on archives, interviews, and experiments, I develop testable theories of culture, morality, identity, and political violence — including when and why people shift between perpetrating violence and refusing to do harm. I am the author of Sacred Betrayal (Harvard University Press, 2026), with award-winning research published in American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, European Journal of Sociology, Social Science History, and major newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
 

I serve as Interim Director of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, home to the Initiative to Study Hate and Dialogue Across Difference, and on the Steering Committee of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Before joining UCLA, I worked with USAID, the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, and Facing History & Ourselves, bringing research on violence and its prevention into policy and education.