Research
My research investigates the geography and political economy of digital capitalism, focusing on how data, algorithms, and platforms reshape markets, cities, and inequalities. To study the social and urban structures of digital capitalism, I use mixed methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, expert interviews, spatial analysis, and computational social science.
The main focus of my research is to analyze how real estate technologies, also called PropTech, are transforming housing markets and renewing social stratification and urban segregation. This work positions South Africa, where I have been doing in-depth fieldwork since 2015, as a key site to understand how 21st-century digital capitalism intersects with long-standing and racialized patterns of inequality, urban development, and market-making.
The geography of finance is my second line of research. I explore how digitization is transforming financial markets, centers, and firms, with an emphasis on FinTech ecosystems, private equity, and venture capital within emerging and postcolonial economies. I am a co-author of the Atlas of Finance, published by Yale University Press in 2024.
Background
I am currently an Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford, where I previously worked as a Research Associate in Finance and Geography on the ERC project Cities in Global Financial Networks (2021-2022). I served as a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (2017-2021). I held visiting positions at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town (2016, 2023) and at the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley (2024-2025). I am an early-career representative at the Global Network on Financial Geography.
The majority of my education took place in France. I am a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where I was a student fellow (éleve normalien), obtained my Master’s degree in Geography & Planning, and passed the agrégation. I then completed my PhD at the University of Grenoble Alpes and at the research centre Géographie-cités in Paris, where I remain a Research Associate. My dissertation received two national awards: the Doctoral Prize in Urban Studies and the Best Dissertation Award in Geography.
As a student, I analysed the geography of rugby, and still keep an eye on it.