Colin is an assistant teaching professor in political science at Northeastern University. His current research agenda is focused on the representation of immigrant-background citizens, primarily in Western Europe. He is particularly interested in electoral and institutional rules that have large, independent, and often unintended effects on the descriptive representation of immigrants and their descendants. Recent work has identified conditions under which the same rules may offer advantages to immigrant minorities while compounding women's under-representation (or vice-versa), looking at variations in German, Dutch and French local election laws.
At Northeastern, Colin will teach a variety of courses including POLS 1155 (Comparative Politics) and POLS 2400 (Quantitative Methods) in Fall 2018. While a College Fellow at Harvard, Colin taught courses on comparative political parties and on the politics of citizenship and naturalization. He has also been actively involved in the development of Harvard's GovWrites, a tool to teach writing skills and concepts of academic integrity to undergraduate government concentrators. He maintains an active interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning, including active research projects studying the effectiveness of writing instruction in political science (with George Soroka and Sarah James) as well as guest contributions to Active Learning in Political Science and other outlets.
Colin received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 2015 and his B.A. in political science from the University of Rochester in 2007 . While doing field work during the 2011-2012 academic year, he worked as a short-term visiting researcher at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences and the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, as well as the Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He serves as a resident tutor in Harvard's Dudley House.