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 the role of recognition, identity, and status in world politics. My forthcoming book, The Recognition Dilemma, is under contract with Cornell University Press. Conflicts over recognition have captured and undermined peace negotiations, making reconciliation between adversaries more difficult and disputes more entrenched, they have been used to frame, defend, and oppose cooperation between states and international organizations, and they have helped legitimize and mobilize political elites and movements able to exploit the emotions and grievances of perceived misrecognition. In the book I ask why these conflicts over recognition emerge when they do, which I answer by centering political elites as agents in the struggle who wield critical power in deciding when recognition matters: when it is withheld, owed, and worth fighting for. A focus on agency highlights that there are real instrumental reasons 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.
I am currently doing ongoing research on the construction and contestation of status orders, and on the power and peril of inevitability as a cognitive heuristic which frames and orders world politics. My research has been published in International Organization, 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.
