Photo credit: Katie Lenhart

Hello! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. I study the political causes and consequences of migration. Through my research, I seek to bring evidence to questions (and often misperceptions) about the effects of hosting migrants on local communities. 

Questions that currently motivate my work include:

How does the settlement of refugees affect local development, conflict, and host citizens’ identities and behaviors?

Under what conditions does coethnicity with host citizens help or hurt migrants’ reception?

When migrants are aware of locals’ negative stereotypes against them, do they change their behaviors in ways that try to counter these stereotypes?

The contexts where I study these questions span East Africa, Central Asia, South America, and the Caribbean.

At Dartmouth, I teach courses on democratization, ethnicity and identity politics, and the political economy of development with a focus on non-Western regions. 

I co-host the podcast Scope Conditions, which features new research in comparative politics by emerging scholars. You can listen to the first few minutes to hear how I pronounce my name (“Young Young Joe”), but I hope you stick around for longer.

Previously, I was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, a Harvard Academy Scholar, and a CIFAR Global Azrieli Scholar. I received my Ph.D. in 2019 from Princeton University. Before graduate school, I was a social work case manager for the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, working with refugees and asylum-seekers from Africa and Asia.