I am an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at George Washington University. I am interested in the relationship between theories developed in sociology and social theory to contemporary debates in International Relations. My first book, Constructive Illusions, won the 2015 Jervis-Schroeder Best Book Prize awarded by the APSA International History and Politics Section.

America's Middlemen, my second book, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. The manuscript articulates a “pericentric” view of American foreign policy (a view that emphasizes action on the periphery instead of the center) to make sense of the ways that agents with marginal institutional power broker cooperation across societies. Building on social network theory, I argue that agents who lack the standard tools of political power often make a difference in promoting international cooperation if their social position between societies allows them to identify partners for cooperation, helps them build trust between cooperation partners, and aids them in mitigating cultural conflict. To show the variety of ways that these agents (including traders, preachers, and adventurers) matter, I examine their role in recruiting non-state allies, such as partisans in the Second World War and Native Americans in the Apache wars. The first piece of this project is in the European Journal of International Relations.