Teaching
My teaching interests largely interact and intersect with my research interests, focusing either on issues relating to racial and ethnic politics, the American Political Economy, or American Politics more generally.Advanced Seminar in Black Politics: Anxieties of Incorporation, Spring 2026, Fall 2026
The experience of Black people in the United States has shaped, refined, and contested the very nature of concepts such as democracy, liberty, and equality. No discussion of these concepts in the context of the United States is complete without a full accounting of how Black people have dealt with them, as critics, exemplars, activists, and theorists. This course will attempt to chart the shifting contours of African American politics and activism in the post-Civil Rights era in order to think about the overlaps and distinctions between electoral politics, popular culture, and insurgent activism. What does it mean to theorize in Black? What happens to an understanding of American Politics and Global Politics when it encounters the analysis of Black people? We will read both canonical and contemporary works in Black politics to give you both a breadth and a depth of what scholars have to say about how Black people both make sense of and resist the overarching political order in the United States.
When Am I Going to Make A Living? The Political Economy of Career Selection, Spring 2026
Building and fashioning a career is one of the most important facets of an individual's life. However, the types of things people desire for their work, how they come to know what types of work are available to them, and how they contend with features of both the micro and macroeconomy that affect their ability to make a living are shaped by political forces far more than individual action. This course looks at changes in the American Political Economy throughout the 20th century to ask questions such as: how do different occupational sectors respond to major economic shifts in terms of who they hire? How does access to education shape people's perceptions of what it means to have a "good life"? And perhaps most important of all, how do political forces mediate individual understandings of the job market and strategic decisions about how to navigate it? While principally a political economy course, this course draws on fields as diverse as sociology, anthropology, education, and cultural studies to think about how the very personal nature of selecting a career is mediated by broader political forces that straddle the bounds between the state and the market.
Intro to American Politics, Spring 2025, Fall 2025, Fall 2026
What makes American institutions American? This course is designed to introduce students to the institutions and dynamics of American Politics. We will also have a particular focus on how we might understand what distinguishes American Politics from politics in other parts of the world. Looking from both the vantage point of “above” in terms of elite processes in institutions like the Presidency, Congress and the Judiciary as well as from “below” in terms of mass public opinion and the impact of race, class, gender, and other axes of identity, this course will chart what about the political system is (and isn’t) idiosyncratic. In so doing, this course will also act as an introduction to the field of political science and what it means to study topics using that lens.
A Seat at the Table?: Race and Representation in American Political Institutions, Spring 2025
The fight for inclusion into American society and culture created new opportunities and dynamics for American politics but how might we understand if and how these political battles translated into material gains for marginalized groups? This course will look at the ways in which representation became a political demand in ways both tied and untied from other goals like anti-poverty and human rights, the economic and judicial processes that shaped the demand for political representation, the ways that representational politics plays out specifically in the realm of Black politics, and the dialectical relationship between politics and popular culture in the 21st Century. Can representation save us? Should it?
American Political Economy, Fall 2025
How does public policy affect markets and the economy? How do broad shifts in the macroeconomy affect political outcomes? Perhaps most importantly of all, how do Americans make sense of and navigate the interplay between American political institutions and major economic institutions? This course is intended to interrogate and more deeply understand the unique features of the American Political Economy (APE) in distinction to other “affluent” democracies, how these distinct features shape political economy, and how political attitudes and behavior responds to these outcomes.