Teaching Philosophy
A vibrant academic discipline ensures an intimate relationship between teaching and research. If research is about claiming knowledge in constructive dialogue with one’s peers, then teaching ought to simulate and stimulate this process. The classroom is uniquely suited to this task. As a teacher, I strive to build a syllabus on a set of powerful heuristics. These amount to my working hypothesis about what rules drive the contest of ideas among academics in my field. This hypothesis then encounters the diversity and dynamism of the students whose readings of individual works and themes cannot and should not be contained by conventions. By nurturing this friction between academic protocol and student creativity, I strive to transform both: students will discover the value of experimenting with a variety of compelling recipes for producing, ordering, and manipulating the empirical; and teacher-researchers like myself are continuously prompted to refresh their software in order to guard against a stale dogmatism. At its very best, student-teacher interactions model the production of academic knowledge more broadly: the rigorous exercise of civil disagreement.
Courses for 2023-24
What Was Multilateralism? (Graduate; Spring 2024)
This seminar stages the academic study of International Political Economy (IPE) as a dialogue between individualist and collectivist theories of politics. Whereas the former scale up from (individual) parts to (collective) wholes, the latter work in the opposite direction. In contrast to those disciplinarians who insist on their rigid separation as research programs, we will watch these theories intersect in the study of institutional and organizational forms. This will allow us to comprehend IPE as a theoretical system whose development can be assimilated to rules every student can learn to apply. Ranging widely across substantive domains of study including the cross-border movements of goods, money, and people, we will focus on building four sets of skills: (1) how to extract from each piece of scholarship its theoretical core; (2) how to reconstruct the theoretical and empirical puzzles that motivate IPE research; (3) how to productively extend the theories we encounter; and (4) how to diagnose and critique what avenues for research particular theories foreclose or even suppress.
International Political Economy (Graduate; Winter 2024)
This seminar stages the academic study of International Political Economy (IPE) as a dialogue between individualist and collectivist theories of politics. Whereas the former scale up from (individual) parts to (collective) wholes, the latter work in the opposite direction. In contrast to those disciplinarians who insist on their rigid separation as research programs, we will watch these theories intersect in the study of institutional and organizational forms. This will allow us to comprehend IPE as a theoretical system whose development can be assimilated to rules every student can learn to apply. Ranging widely across substantive domains of study including the cross-border movements of goods, money, and people, we will focus on building four sets of skills: (1) how to extract from each piece of scholarship its theoretical core; (2) how to reconstruct the theoretical and empirical puzzles that motivate IPE research; (3) how to productively extend the theories we encounter; and (4) how to diagnose and critique what avenues for research particular theories foreclose or even suppress.
International Order and Security New (Graduate; Autumn 2023)
This team-taught lecture course covers the nuts and bolts for designing an M.A. thesis project and assists students in producing a design document that will later become the M.A. thesis proposal. It decomposes what is a lengthy and complex process into its component parts. The course is divided into two parts. In part I, the instructors will deliver a series of short pre-recorded video lectures. These lectures will serve as the basis for conversation during twice-weekly Zoom sessions among members of each preceptor group. The series of lectures and discussion sections will walk students through the iterative sequence of project conception and design. Grounded in principles of transparency and equity, much of the material will cover those fundamentals of academic work that rarely receive the explicit treatment they deserve. In part II of the course, students will write up and present a first version of their M.A. thesis design document. In Winter Quarter, they will build on the design document and the feedback they receive to compose and submit an M.A. thesis proposal for approval by a faculty advisor and their preceptor.
Past Courses
International Politics of Asia (Graduate)
This seminar is a graduate-level survey of the contemporary cross-national politics of Asia. It centers the perspectives brought to bear on these issues by the state and society of modern India. The course covers four overarching areas of scholarship: (1) statebuilding, civil-military relations, nationalism and its associated practices of national identity construction; (2) intrastate conflict and contentious politics including human rights and the rule of law; (3) the political economy of development and environmental sustainability since liberalization; and (4) regional geopolitical and geoeconomic competition. This survey is offered distinctly from, but as a pre-requisite for, participation in CIR’s March 2020 Asian International Relations Seminar in Mumbai and Delhi.
Network Theory for International Political Economy (Graduate)
This course introduces students to the ongoing network turn in international political economy (IPE). It conceives of social network theory (SNT) as a family of structural propositions, and explores when and how students of IPE began to turn to networks.
The aim of this course is threefold. First, students will replace purely metaphorical talk of networks with focused propositions about the network properties and dynamics of international political, economic, and social relations. Second, students will become familiar with SNT's intellectual lineages. Finally, students will critically assess the ability of SNT to be a vehicle for innovative social science.
The Politics of Globalization (Undergraduate)
Popular opinion about globalization is bipolar: Those who embrace the promise of universal access to an integrated world market oppose those who reaffirm the value of a fragmented global order that remains responsive to local diversity and difference. We will study how this contest between integration and fragmentation plays out at the level of the individual, the nation-state, international institutions, and the global system as a whole.
Course readings and conversation will center on four questions: (1) What are the political forces that enable and retard the global expansion of markets? (2) How do political actors and institutions respond to the market’s uneven distribution of rewards? (3) How, in turn, do market actors and institutions navigate spaces whose occupants manage to curtail competition? (4) What does elite and popular resistance to globalization look like today?
International Organizations (Undergraduate)
This course introduces students to the political economy of international organizations (IOs). Public opinion about IOs presents us with a puzzle: IOs are either powerful and unaccountable bureaucratic monsters or assemblies of weak idealists who find themselves constrained by international power politics. We will enlist canonical theoretical arguments to debate the roles IOs have played in five prominent domains of international policy: trade, finance, development, environment, and human rights. In particular, we will explore what we gain and what we lose by studying the activities of IOs in one of three roles: (1) autonomous guardians of an imagined international society; (2) dependent agents of the most powerful states; and (3) open access platforms on which governments, corporations, and activist groups argue and bargain.