I am an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M's Bush School of Government and Public Service. 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 at the University of Chicago in 2021.
I research international relations with a focus on security cooperation, alliance politics, and proxy war. In my book project and related articles, I examine how powerful states use security cooperation tools, like military training and advising, to shape how a local military approaches a variety of issues, such as military reform, human rights, civil-military relations, and the foreign policy priorities of the sending state. My dissertation on this topic won an honorable mention for Best Dissertation in 2022 from the American Political Science Association’s International Collaboration section. Another area of my research focuses on international security issues in the context of NATO, Ukraine, and Russia. My work also engages with proxy war and political violence. I combine political economy methodology with archival and interview research. My research is published in the Journal of Peace Research, International Politics, the International Studies Review, 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 Polish and some Russian and held internships or fellowships with The RAND Corporation, the Political-Economic section at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, and the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. |