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. While at Yale, I was affiliated with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

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 (under review) concerns “presidential prioritization,” the process by which presidents and their teams determine the domestic policy issues on which they will focus at the start of their administrations. It advances an agency-centered perspective on agenda construction that emphasizes self-assertion over conformity to external constraints, exposing the internal contradictions of presidential democracy across nine case studies from the modern era. Portions of this work have appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly and Evaluating the Obama Presidency: From Transformational Goals to Governing Realities (De Gruyter 2024). 

A companion project, Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint (co-authored with John A. Dearborn; Cambridge University Press, Elements in American Politics Series, 2025), focused on 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 legally permissible but contrary to stated congressional intent. Focusing on appointments legislation in the post-Watergate era, we demonstrate lawmakers' reliance on presidential self-restraint in statutory design and identify a variety of institutional tools used to signal those expectations. Moreover, we identify a developmental dilemma: the combined rise of polarization, presidentialism, and constitutional formalism threatens to leave Congress more dependent on presidential self-restraint, even as that norm's reliability is increasingly questionable. A prior version of this project earned the 2025 MPSA Patrick J. Fett Award for the best paper on the scientific study of Congress and the presidency.

I am likewise in the early stages of two other book projects. The first, tentatively titled "Playing for the Ages: Logics of Legacy in the American Presidency," explores how variation in presidents' legacy concerns across time explains changes in presidential conduct. I presented my initial theory with an empirical application to the Gilded Age at APSA 2025 and SPSA 2026. The second is a developmental account of congressional decline relative to the presidency over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I will be presenting my initial foray into this endeavor, which focuses on the legislature's long-term response to the Supreme Court's Myers decision, at APSA 2026.

Thanks for stopping by my page! I am always happy to discuss research and teaching, as well as the Philadelphia Eagles, the current Broadway season, and northern New England. I am the four-time champion of my Survivor fantasy league, and I was one pick away from a top-ten bracket nationally in the 2026 NCAA men's basketball tournament.