Teaching

My teaching philosophy centers around curiosity, engagement, and inclusion. Tapping into a student's curiosity can propel them down unanticipated paths toward new knowledge. Engagement occurs when students choose to actively cultivate knowledge through questioning, discussion, debate, and research. Inclusion embraces differences to reap the pedagogical benefits of identity diversity and cognitive diversity. I encourage all three through intentional syllabus design, by emphasizing civil dialogue in the classroom, and by ensuring that I am available, approachable, and responsive outside the classroom. 

A teaching statement and evaluations are available upon request. Please reach out to me.

at Duke Kunshan University

• POLSCI 104: Comparative Politics and Institutions provides first- and second-year students with an introductory course in how domestic politics are organized around the world. The emphasis is on how institutions enable and shape political action, and how these institutions are therefore the subject of political contestation. (Fall 2022 hybrid; Spring 2023, 2024 in-person)

• POLSCI 201: Political Institutions and Processes introduces first- and second-year students to the diverse array of formal rules, informal practices, and regularized decision-making bodies which facilitate and constrain political choice and action. We examine regime varieties as well as a host of democratic and authoritarian institutions, before turning to issues of institutional origins, persistence, and change. (Spring 2022 hybrid)

• POLSCI 209: Democratic Erosion examines the perceived global trend of democratic backsliding—including its causes, symptoms, and consequences—through a series of case studies from around the world. As a writing-intensive class, students learn multiple approaches to communication, including blogging and academic essay writing. This course is adapted from—and, in turn, contributes to—the shared curriculum of a cross-university consortium. (Spring 2020 online)

• POLSCI 222: Social Choice and Democracy brings sophomores and juniors face to face with the problems of preference aggregation and social choice which are inherent to the idea of democracy. Topics covered include voting methods and paradoxes, spatial models of voting, Arrow's impossibility theorem, apportionment, and gerrymandering. (Fall 2023 in-person)

• POLSCI 301: Program Evaluation introduces sophomores and juniors to causal inference and design-based approaches to the evaluation of social interventions and their impacts. Topics covered include simulating statistical power; experimental, natural experimental, and quasi-experimental research designs; cost-benefit analyses, and pre-analysis plans. (Fall 2020 in-person; Spring 2021, 2022 hybrid; Spring 2023, 2024 in-person)

• POLSCI 315: American Politics in Comparative Perspective examines the actors, institutions, and processes of American politics from an explicitly comparative and rational choice perspective. Topics covered include federalism and the states, the constitution and its interpretation, Congress and its committees, the presidency and bureaucracy, the court system, and voting and elections. (Fall 2022 in-person)

• PUBPOL 301: Political Analysis for Public Policy takes a comparative approach to the actors, institutions, and processes which shape public policy in the United States and China. Topics covered include agenda setting, decision making, implementation, and evaluation. (Spring 2020 online; Spring 2021 hybrid; Fall 2021 hybrid; Spring 2022 hybrid; Spring 2024 in-person)

• SOSC 101: Foundational Questions in Social Science, team-taught by faculty across the social sciences, this course introduces students to big questions which have long animated social scientific research. Topics covered include families and social groups, governments and religions, markets and order, and justice and morality. (Spring 2021 hybrid)

MiniTerms

• Measure What Counts: Quantifying Social Scientific Concepts aims to help sophomores, over four days, workshop their nascent Signature Work project ideas by exploring various social scientific concepts, measurement strategies, and data sources. Concepts discussed include ideology, prestige, power, centrality, segregation, and disproportionality. (Spring 2022 hybrid; Spring 2023 in-person)

at Duke University

• POLSCI 264S: Democratic Erosion covered substantially similar ground to the DKU offering above, but a semester format enabled deeper theoretical dives and a novel online simulation exercise through the ICONS platform. (Fall 2019 in-person)

• POLSCI 116D: American Political System, for Dave Rohde. Introductory undergraduate lecture in American politics, taught from a rational choice perspective. (Fall 2018)

• POLSCI 180FS: Nature of Freedom in Political Organizations, for Georg Vanberg. Small freshman seminar focused on core readings in constitutionalism including Hobbes, Locke, Buchanan and Tullock, and Olson. (Fall 2016)

• POLSCI 342: Strategy and Politics, for Georg Vanberg. Small undergraduate lecture introducing topics from positive political theory such as Condorcet's Paradox, Arrow's Theorem, and spatial voting models. (Fall 2017)

• POLSCI 631: Introductory Game Theory, for Bahar Leventoğlu. Introductory graduate course in game theory covering Nash equilibrium, extensive-form games of perfect and imperfect information, and PBE. (Spring 2017)