Drew Stommes

Welcome—I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. In July 2024, I will begin as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Politics at New York University.

I study the intersection of democracy, violent conflict, and identity, drawing upon extensive qualitative fieldwork in India, quantitative data collection, 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 has been published in 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.