I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs at Texas A&M's Bush School of Government and Public Service and a core faculty member with the Albritton Center for Grand Strategy. For 2024, I'm a Non-Resident Fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a joint production of Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point. I'm also a co-host of the Social Science of War podcast. Previously, I was a Rosenwald Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security and Niehaus Postdoctoral Fellow at The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2021.
I'm a professor of international relations. My research examines the politics of security cooperation and its effectiveness. I'm fascinated by how powerful states use tools we often think of as simply technical military-to-military cooperation — like military advisors and arms transfers — to increase their influence over allies, partners, and proxies. My other research interests include proxy and irregular warfare, and NATO, Russia, and Ukraine. My work combines political economy methodology with qualitative research based on archives, interviews, and fieldwork. My dissertation on this topic won an honorable mention for Best Dissertation in 2022 from the American Political Science Association’s International Collaboration section. My research has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, International Politics, the International Studies Review, Defence Studies, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, and several edited volumes. It has been supported by the United States Institute of Peace and the Minerva Research Initiative, the Notre Dame International Security Center, The Charles Koch Foundation, and The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, and The Social Sciences Research Center at the University of Chicago. I earned an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, and a B.S. in Foreign Service from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, with a concentration in International Security and a minor in Russia and East European Studies. I speak intermediate Polish and basic Russian and held internships or fellowships with The RAND Corporation, the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, and the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. |