Teaching

In the upcoming academic year, I will be teaching:

POLISCI 437C 20th Century and Contemporary Political Theory (Fall 2024)

This graduate seminar provides a survey of some of the major contributions to (primarily Western) political thought in the past century. The course places special emphasis on the development of theories of political authority and legitimacy in the context of the modern bureaucratic state and global order, as well as the connection between authority and other key concepts in normative political theory: freedom, justice, equality, and democracy.

COLLEGE 102 Citizenship in the 21st Century (Winter 2025)

This is the second of three courses in Stanford’s required first year sequence in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). This seminar-style course explores the challenges of living together in a large and diverse community, offering students the opportunity to practice civic skills like active listening, to reflect on their role in complex political, economic, and technological systems, to design solutions to collective action problems, and to experience respectful disagreement on difficult ethical questions.

POLISCI 132A/ETHICSOC 134R The Ethics of Elections (Winter 2025)

Do you have a duty to vote? Who should be allowed to vote? How should we draw electoral districts? How should we regulate campaign finance? Should we even have elections at all? In this course, we will explore these and other ethical questions related to electoral participation and the design of electoral institutions. We will evaluate arguments from political philosophers, political scientists, journalists and politicians to better understand whether and how electoral systems promote democratic values like political equality and how this affects citizens’ and political leaders ethical obligations. We will use these animating questions as a context in which to practice a rigorous approach to ethical argument and work toward mastery of ethical reasoning.

POLISCI 335T Representation and Democracy (NEW! Spring 2025)

What is the relationship between representative government and democracy? What makes someone a good representative, and what kinds of institutions and social norms promote good representation? This advanced undergraduate course explores 20^th and 21^st century theories of political representation and brings them to bear on both big picture questions about the values of electoral democracy and contemporary controversies about, for example, race-conscious districting and judicial elections. This course also examines political representation outside of electoral institutions, asking how our understanding of democratic representation changes when we turn our attention to organizers, activists, and civic leaders.