Drew Stommes

Welcome—I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Politics at New York University. My substantive research in comparative politics studies the interplay between democracy, conflict, and identity, and draws upon cutting-edge statistical methods along with intensive qualitative fieldwork. I have a regional interest in South Asia (India, in particular). In 2024, I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, where my dissertation was awarded with departmental and university distinction.

My book manuscript conceptualizes armed political parties and then develops and tests a theory explaining micro-level variation in these parties’ violence against partisan rivals. The book draws upon novel quantitative data from the Indian state of West Bengal along with qualitative evidence drawn from over eighty interviews I conducted with local party workers and leaders in the state. Additional chapters evaluate the external validity of my theory with data concerning political party violence in the Reconstruction Era U.S. South and contemporary Bangladesh. I will be hosting a book conference at NYU in August 2025.

During the 2022-23 academic year, I was a U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) Peace Scholar. I have received generous support from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and the Yale Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy. During the 2018-19 academic year, I completed an intensive Bangla (Bengali) language training program at the American Institute of Indian Studies in Kolkata, India.