Teaching

PSCI 1404: American Foreign Policy (undergraduate lecture, spring 2025, spring 2024)

This course explores the use and non-use of military force in American foreign policy with a particular focus on the post-Cold War period. The United States has long played an active role in international politics, and since the end of the Cold War, it has frequently turned to the use of force to advance its interests on the world stage. How does the United States make decisions about when and how to use force? How well has the use of force achieved U.S. foreign policy objectives? We will examine the domestic actors involved in the foreign policy decision-making process as well as the international challenges and constraints on the use of force. We will also analyze the success and failure of military operations since the end of the Cold War. Because the decision not to use force tells us something about the politics of military force, we will also investigate the foreign policy alternatives to the use of force.

PSCI 0010: Making the Modern State (freshman seminar, spring 2024)

What is the modern state, and how did it come to be? All modern states have sovereignty, territory, and political communities that constitute the nation. Modern states also protect, provide, regulate, appropriate, and adjudicate. In politically developed states, the state’s ordering of society and deep reach into the lives of the governed is so pervasive and routine as to become banal. In this first-year seminar, we explore how the modern state came to be. We will examine the constitutive features of the state, such as territory, as well as the essential functions and activities of the state, such as the collection of information, the provision of education, and the evolution of taxation. Much of our investigation proceeds through everyday “encounters” with the state and the “artifacts” of state development — such as maps depicting the territorial expanse of the state, the world of bureaucratic paperwork, the origin of last names — with the objective of unearthing the deeply political nature of aspects of statehood that we now take for granted.