Teaching Overview

My teaching experience spans the fields of IR theory, global justice, data analysis, and statistics. Brief descriptions of courses I have taught are provided below, and syllabi are available upon request. I am also eager to design and teach new courses on normative international relations theory as well as methods courses such as regression/maximum likelihood estimation and causal inference.

Political Science 300: Global Justice (Syracuse University)

Is it possible to achieve global justice? What would such a world look like and what does this tell us about how to live today in our own unjust world? In this course, we examine answers to this question from a diverse set of perspectives. We begin by examining the broad theoretical frameworks of the discipline that posit different ways of understanding the scope of our obligations to distant others. In the second part of the course, we apply these frameworks to specific topics including global economic relations, the environment, and migration. Throughout, students will be encouraged to not only form an opinion on whether relatively affluent individuals and states have global obligations to the most vulnerable in the world, but also how exactly these obligations ought to be distributed among both states and individuals.

Political Science 124: International Relations (Syracuse University)

This course is an introduction to the study of international relations (IR). It fosters skills to critically analyze and discuss a wide range of political phenomena, with a special focus on processes of conflict and cooperation in global politics. We will start with an introduction to the general theoretical frameworks of the discipline, such as Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism. In the second part of the course we apply our theoretical tools to specific topics, including the causes of war, economic relations, international organizations, and environmental politics.

Political Science 400: Data Visualization (Syracuse University)

Data and data analysis are increasingly important for political science research as well as in the public discourse and the workplace. In this class, you will learn how to conduct data visualization yourself. We'll cover topics such as finding data, data cleaning, data manipulation, and data visualization. Along the way, we'll learn basic statistical functions and plots in the powerful (and free) statistical program R. Throughout, the class takes an applied approach, so students will develop their own research project and conduct their own data visualizations.

Political Science 202: Political Analysis (Syracuse University)

The purpose of this course, required for political science majors, is to build skills for conducting, interpreting, and presenting political science research. These skills include basic research and data collection practices, techniques for measuring political science concepts quantitatively, hypothesis testing, interpretation of statistical evidence, and the presentation of findings in a clear and compelling manner.

Maxwell School 201: Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences 

MAX 201 was developed by an interdisciplinary committee of faculty members in the Maxwell School and designed to introduce students to the ways that quantitative data is used by social scientists in their research. It exposes students to examples of research design and quantitative analysis for the social sciences. We believe that the best way to accomplish these goals is through intensive, hands-on experience. Thus, in MAX 201, you will be using SPSS, a user-friendly statistical software package, to work with research concepts and social science research data.

Political Science 2300: American Foreign Policy (Ohio State University)

This course examines contemporary issues in U.S. foreign policy. The central goal of this course is to provide students with the knowledge and analytical skills necessary to grapple with the question: what should America’s role in a turbulent world be? Within the U.S. foreign policy community, an active debate has been raging about whether the U.S. should pull back its forces from around the world and practice restraint or if it should remain actively engaged in world affairs and continue to assert itself militarily and economically. By the end of this class, students will stake out a position on this important issue, using course materials to articulate the grand strategy they believe U.S. officials should adopt moving forward.