Welcome to my website.  I am an Assistant Professor at the Australian National University.  My research focuses on how the electoral and career incentives of political actors affect foreign and security policy.   My book project explains why conservative Japanese politicians suddenly started paying attention to national security in 1996, after ignoring it for almost four decades.   It makes use of new tools for the statistical analysis of text, several new data sets, and fifteen months of fieldwork in Japan.  Past research has been published in Foreign Policy Analysis, Politics and Policy, Japan Forum, and Political Science.

I graduated with a Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2011.  I earned my B.A. Hons (First Class) in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington in 2003 and my B.A. in Japanese and Political Studies from the University of Otago in 2002, both in my native New Zealand.   I studied Politics and International Relations at the University of Tokyo from 2000-2001 on the AIKOM program, and again from 2003-2004 on a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship, during which time I served as an intern for Japan's Liberal Democratic Party.   I have taken ten years of formal training in the Japanese language and have spent five years in Japan.

More information about my research, data, publications, and teaching can be found by clicking the links above or reading my C.V.