Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College, where I teach courses on international politics, international security, and international law. At the advanced level, I alternate between seminars on identity in global politics, and technological change and world order.
My research centers around questions of identity and status in world politics. My forthcoming book, Dilemmas of Recognition in World Politics, is under contract with Cornell University Press. Just as individuals yearn for recognition—to be seen by others the way they see themselves—scholars increasingly emphasize how the social uncertainty, instability, and anarchy of world politics creates a palpable need for recognition among states as well. This framing, however, takes both the desire for recognition, and recognition conflict, as a taken for granted feature of world politics. In the book I contest these assumptions and ask why these conflicts over recognition emerge when they do. To answer this question, the book centers political elites as agents in the struggle who wield critical power in deciding when recognition matters: when it is withheld, owned, and worth fighting for. A focus on agency highlights that there are real instrumental incentives for certain elites to elevate recognition conflict, just as there are also real pressures and incentives to dismiss and downplay such conflicts. How elites navigate this tension, and to what effect, is a core focus of the book. Substantively, the book centers around a diverse set of cases: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Armenian-Turkish genocide dispute, and Brexit. As a Northeast Scholars’ Circle Awardee, the manuscript was recently featured and discussed at the International Studies Association’s Northeast conference.
Beyond the book, I am doing ongoing research on the construction and contestation of status orders, with a particular interest in how status politics, and great power competition, may be reconstituting how major powers are responding to the climate crisis.
My research has been published in major academic journals, including International Studies Quarterly, the European Journal of International Relations, and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Public commentary stemming from this research has been featured in the Monkey Cage @ the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Al Jazeera English.
Before coming to Oberlin, I earned a Ph.D. (2019) from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University.
