POLI 150: Introduction to International Relations and Global Politics

Instructor of Record: Fall 2020, Spring 2022
Teaching Assistant: Fall 2019, Fall 2021, Spring 2023

This course is an introduction to international relations for undergraduates, both majors and non-majors. It is designed to explain the most important topics and puzzles in the academic field of IR and to enable students to use analytic concepts to evaluate contemporary world politics. We work through our understanding of global politics by discussing the major actors and institutions in world politics, reviewing patterns in global conflict and cooperation, applying past analytical frameworks to current events, and puzzling together about the future of major political trends. Students leave this course being able to identify important events and actors in international affairs, describe political science research practices, apply such practices to analyze current events, and construct arguments about the issues that will define international relations going forward.

POLI 783: Introduction to Probability and Statistics

Lab Instructor: Fall 2022, Fall 2023
(graduate level)

This course is the first of a three-part methods sequence for political science graduate students. The lab portion of this course introduces students to best practices in social science publishing and data science through LaTeX and R. I designed the lab to both connect to the primary mathematical material from the lecture but mainly to establish a foundation of skills that will enable students to quickly understand how to explore and analyze their own data, both in future methods courses and on their own. Students leave this course competent publishing manuscripts in LaTeX and Markdown and manipulating data in R, including cleaning and visualizing data, simulating data from probability distributions, and designing personalized functions.

POLI 231: Race, Innocence, and the Decline of the Death Penalty

Teaching Assistant: Spring 2020

This class is about a surprising American political development: the death penalty seems to be disappearing. A large majority of Americans has traditionally supported the death penalty in the abstract. But across the country for about the past 20 years, the numbers of death sentences and executions have been declining and admissions to death row have slowed to a trickle. Even if its practice is diminishing, its constitutionality remains a lightningrod in American politics. This course guides students through a social scientific analysis of why the death penalty is declining and why, especially through the lens of race in America, its constitutionality is up for debate.

POLI 787: Game Theory I

Teaching Assistant: Spring 2021
(graduate level)

This course is the first of a two-part game theory sequence for graduate students. It introduces students to non-cooperative game theory by covering several solution concepts — equilibrium, subgame perfect, Bayesian Nash, Perfect Bayesian, and separating and pooling equilibria — through rigorous application and problem sets.