Bio

Hello, and thank you for visiting my webpage. I am a sixth-year graduate student studying political theory in the Department of Government at Harvard. I received my BA cum laude in Political Science at Yale (2002) and my DPhil in Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, where I wrote a dissertation on the historical background and development of Isaiah Berlin's political thought (forthcoming as a monograph with Oxford University Press). My teaching and research range over the history of political thought, recent liberal and democratic theory, and political ethics. My historical interests center on political thought in the twentieth century; European (and particularly British) political thought from Hobbes onwards; and American political thought (particularly that of the founding period, and the early-to-mid twentieth century). Within both the history of political thought and recent normative theory, I am interested in theories of liberty; arguments about the purposes and limits of politics; the implications for political theory of ethical and political pluralism; and questions about the ethics of political action. In addition to these areas, I have teaching interests in politics and literature, in utopian political thought, and in the study of political ideologies; while my current research looks at attacks on and defenses of liberal conceptions of politics in twentieth-century political thought as a means of reflecting on questions about the ethics of political action.

Please click on the page links at left for more information on my teaching, research, and publications.