I am an assistant professor of political science at Holy Cross. I received my PhD in political science (with distinction) from Yale University in May 2025, where I was affiliated with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. I received my BA from Williams College in June 2018.

I am chiefly interested in American presidential democracy, understanding the role of presidential leadership in America's system of separated powers. My current book project (revise and resubmit at Cambridge University Press) concerns the construction of presidents' domestic policy agendas at the beginning of their terms. It advances an agency-centered perspective on agenda construction that emphasizes self-assertion over conformity to external constraints. Portions of this work have appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly and Evaluating the Obama Presidency: From Transformational Goals to Governing Realities (De Gruyter 2024). 

My last book, Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint (co-authored with John A. Dearborn; Cambridge University Press, Elements in American Politics Series, 2025), explains how Congress has designed laws reliant on an assumption that presidents would respect statutory goals by declining to use their formal powers in ways that were legal but contrary to congressional intent. A prior version of the project earned the 2025 MPSA Patrick J. Fett Award.

I am likewise in the early stages of two other book projects. One is about presidents' conceptions of their role and how those conceptions configure their governing. The second is a developmental account of congressional decline.