Teaching
Research Design (Graduate)
This course tackles the most challenging part of what we do: how to take an interest and turn it into research that people believe. It is about the types of questions we ask, it is about the different strategies for answering those questions, and it is about all the things that can go wrong along the way. What is a good question (and a bad one)? How do I devise hypotheses? How do I know if my question is best studied with a lot of quantitative data or a few in-depth case studies? How objective am I? (lol you're not) How do we design research that is both good and ethical?
Terrorism & Genocide (Undergraduate)
This course is about politically-motivated violence and how we name it. It is a course about why words are important, how words can cause harm, and how words can be a source of reparation. It is a course about how words and concepts allow us to better analyze and understand events---and how they sometimes undermine that goal.
We interrogate our preconceived notions about ``terrorism" and ``genocide" and then we will dismantle them brick by brick. In their place, we will build a more complex and unified picture of how we understand, analyze, and respond to political violence as individuals, as countries, and as societies.
Political Analysis (Undergraduate)
This course is an introduction to how we conduct research in political science. If pressed to condense it into one sentence, I would tell you that the class engages two parallel discussions: the data of politics and the politics of data.
We survey various methodologies in the discipline, examine where data come from, how to analyze it, and all the things that can go wrong along the way. My goal is for students to come away able to perform basic data analysis and to ask nuanced and incisive questions about how we know what we know.
Rebellion, Conflict, and Political Violence (Undergraduate)
This course explores within-state political violence from a variety of angles. We will look at the causes and dynamics of rebellion and civil war. We will examine how civil wars end and what the implications are as states attempt to restore stability. We will examine the varieties of state repression, both at home and abroad. More broadly, we will ask what social science can bring to our understanding of human conflict. How can we study civil wars? What can one rebellion tell us about future rebellions in other countries, if anything? What are the challenges that come with studying political violence, and how do they affect our knowledge?
