I am a senior in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, majoring in Regional and Comparative Studies with a focus on East Asia and Europe and minoring in Japanese and Art History. My academic interests include party politics, ideology, political theory, democratization and democratic backsliding, and political geography, and I am currently preparing my senior thesis on the disparate fates of dominant party systems in Japan and Italy during the mid-1990s. I hope to pursue doctoral studies in comparative politics after graduation and make a career out of research and analysis in service of free and open democracy around the globe, whether it be in academia, policy research, or the public sector. In doing so, I hope to unite the fields of history and political science, using lessons from past challenges to democracy to inform our response to such challenges in the present.