He received his doctoral degree from The Johns Hopkins University in 2007. His main areas of expertise are political economy, labor and agrarian movements, global commodity studies, comparative and world historical sociology, and Latin American development. His research focuses on questions related to labor/agrarian struggles and global capitalism, state and paramilitary violence, class and state formation, and the social contradictions of global commodity chains. The bulk of his research draws upon qualitative and comparative-historical methods of analysis. His recent work has been published in various scholarly journals, including Politics and Society, Global Labour Journal, the Journal of World Systems Research, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, Environment and Planning A, among others.