Currently, I am a Lecturer in Critical Writing at the Marks Family Center for Excellence in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am also affiliated with the Department of Political Science and the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. In addition, I am an Associate Faculty member with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
My current research explores how conceptualizations of the state, especially in the modern social sciences, hold underlying normative and practical implications for how we understand democracy as both a theory of society and as a form of political practice. More broadly, I am interested in questions of sovereignty and authority, political crisis, and democratization as a political phenomenon. My secondary area of interest is in post-Soviet and post-Communist politics, society, and culture.
My current book manuscript, titled The Rediscovery of the State: Crisis and Knowledge Production in Postwar Political Science, examines how the changing understandings and usages of the concept of "the state" in twentieth century American political science reflected the relationship between social scientific theorizing about political power and the hegemony of postwar liberalism. I explore how the renewed interest in critical theories of the state during the 1970s and 1980s stemmed from the crisis of the postwar liberal model. This intellectual shift underscores the contemporary nexus between liberal democracy, capitalism, and the state, with implications for how we understand all three from the vantage point of the social sciences.
I earned my Ph.D. (2017) from the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. My work has appeared in journals such as Polity, Contemporary Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, Historical Materialism, and Science & Society. My dissertation, Discipline, Knowledge, and Critique: Marxist Theory and the Revival of the State in American Political Science, 1968-1989, was awarded the 2018 New Political Science Dissertation Award from the New Political Science section of the American Political Science Association.