Welcome! 

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Law at Lafayette College. I am also a research associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. My work focuses on the politics of authoritarianism and how divisions among powerful authoritarian stakeholders can shape the prospects of democratization as well as the stability of new democracies. In my book project, I document a novel source of these divisions arising from elites' investments in distinct forms of labor control under authoritarianism. I explore these dynamics in Latin America, with a particular focus on Argentina and Chile. Research from this project won the 2024 Sage Best Paper Award from APSA's Comparative Politics section and received an honorable mention for the Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy. My research has also been awarded the Founders Award for the best paper on executive politics. All of my work draws on natural experiments, archival research, as well as qualitative and quantitative data. 

Before coming to Lafayette College, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. I received my PhD in Political Science from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023. I completed a Master's in Political Science from FLACSO, Ecuador. I also hold a B.A. in Political Science and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University of Michigan. 

I can be reached at callisa@lafayette.edu.