Kasia Nalewajko

I am an assistant professor of political science at the Collegio Carlo Alberto and the coordinator of the Social and Political Sciences track of the Allievi Honors Program.

I research the dynamics and legacies of extreme forms of violence. Specifically, I am motivated to understand how genocides start, how people try to survive them, and how we remember them. I am a proponent of mixed-methods designs. In my work, I use causal inference, standard statistical methods, and process tracing. Being a polyglot, I also love playing with computational tools. They help me acquire, clean, and analyse data. For example, I have recently been using LLMs to turn encyclopedic text into analysable data frames. More typically, I rely on traditional methods such as web scraping, OCR, and rule-based or statistical feature-based text analysis. By using these methods alongside social science theories and deep case knowledge I seek to make cross-disciplinary contributions to political science and to history scholarship. Some of my research has appeared or will soon appear in the American Political Science Review and in the British Journal of Political Science.

Previously, I held a joint position of postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad Carlos III and Juan March Institute. I received my Ph.D. from the European University Institute in December 2022 and master's degrees from the Hertie School of Governance and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. During my Ph.D. I was a visiting Fulbright researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

You can find my CV here.