Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College. At Oberlin I teach courses on international law, international security, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as advanced seminars on identity in global politics, and genocide and international criminal law. Before coming to Oberlin, I earned a Ph.D. (2019) from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University.
Political leaders often engage in open fights for recognition, announcing that some crucial element of their state’s identity, status, or history has not been acknowledged or respected. Recognition campaigns of this sort have captured peace-negotiations, they have made reconciliation between adversaries more difficult and conflicts more entrenched, and they have been used to frame, defend, and oppose cooperation between states and international organizations. My book project, Dilemmas of Recognition in World Politics, critically asks why recognition conflicts such as these emerge when they do, and focuses its answer on the role that political agents play in deciding when recognition matters: when it is withheld, owed, and worth fighting for. Substantively, this work centers around a diverse set of cases: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Armenian-Turkish genocide dispute, Brexit, and China’s great power rise. 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 also working on a parallel project 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.
