Drew Stommes

Welcome—I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Politics at New York University. In May 2024, I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, where my dissertation was awarded with departmental and university distinction.

My substantive research interests lie at the intersection of democracy, conflict, and identity, and draw upon extensive qualitative fieldwork in India and cutting-edge statistical methods. My doctoral dissertation (book project) conceptualizes armed political parties and then develops and tests a theory explaining micro-level variation in these parties’ violence against partisan rivals. In addition to my applied research, I write on quantitative methods in the social sciences. My work is forthcoming/published in World Development, the Journal of Peace Research, and Research & Politics.

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.