Teaching
Courses Taught
POLS 3313: Introduction to International Relations
Undergraduate course at the University of Houston and Vanderbilt University
What factors determine the interactions of states on the international stage? Why do wars occur? What underlies the decision to trade with or sanction another actor? Why do groups choose to use terrorism or insurgency, and how can they be stopped? This course will touch on these questions and others, providing a broad survey of some of the most important topics in world politics. During the course, students will learn what questions are relevant to contemporary international relations, what approaches scholars are using to analyze them, and how to think critically about these issues.
POLS 3331: American Foreign Policy
Undergraduate course at the University of Houston
What drives the foreign policy of the United States? What actors play key roles in policy formulation? What institutions influence their decisions? What has American foreign policy looked like since World War II? This course will touch on these questions and others, providing students with a thorough understanding of historical and contemporary U.S. foreign policy. During the course, students will gain familiarity with the history of foreign policy in the United States, the players involved in its formulation, and the process of policymaking, and will learn to think critically about the role of the United States in global politics. The course begins with a historical survey of American foreign policy since World War II, and then takes a more in-depth look at the players and institutions that help to develop and implement policy in the United States.
POLS 6001: Mathematical Methods for Political Scientists
Graduate course at the University of Houston
This is the graduate-level mathematics refresher course meant for students beginning their first or second year in the PhD program. The course is meant to review basic concepts in order to prepare students to succeed in the department's technical sequence. We cover the basics of functions, set theory, calculus of a single variable, linear algebra, systems of equations, and OLS regression. The course wraps up with a brief introduction to the R statistical computing environment.
POLS 6313: Field Seminar in International Relations
Graduate course at the University of Houston
This is a graduate-level course meant to provide students with a broad overview of the field of international relations and to prepare them for the field's comprehensive examination. Each week, we will examine a different topic within the IR literature. The literature that we survey will include both foundational and more recent works, and will take a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. The course has three primary objectives. First, by the semester's end, students should be broadly familiar with the IR canon, and should have a general understanding of the important questions that have motivated scholars in the past and that drive them today. Second, students will critically analyze a wide variety of published research, and will learn to understand and critique international relations literature. Finally, they will learn to identify theoretical and methodological trends, and will gain an understanding of how they can situate their own research within the literature.
POLS 6332: Formal Models in International Relations
Graduate course at the University of Houston
This course is designed for graduate students who are interested in the formal analysis of international relations. It is meant to provide students with a thorough understanding of how the rational choice approach and the use of mathematical models can help to answer questions about international relations. We will build slowly, starting from an introduction to rational choice theory and its applications in IR, moving to the formalization of the rational approach through game theory, integrating this with the mathematical tools necessary to develop and solve formal models, and finally, examining some of the key literature in the field. The course will culminate in students developing their own ideas, which they will explore formally in a research paper.
PSCI 2210: Western European Politics
Undergraduate course at Vanderbilt University
This course provides an introduction to politics in today's Western European democracies. We will focus on the issues and institutions that drive the political system within and across the countries in the region. The first part of the course is a broad overview of the history, politics, and institutions of modern Europe. The second part delves more deeply into five specific European countries: Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, and the UK. Students learn about each of these countries in greater depth, and discover how the concepts outlined in the first portion of the course apply in each of these cases. Students also take part in a group project, in which they research another European country, culminating in a presentation to the class.
SA.600.907: Quantitative Methods in International Relations
Graduate-level course at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe
This is a quantitative reasoning course, designed for students currently pursuing a master's degree. The course is meant to provide students with a thorough introduction to the use of statistical methodology in the analysis of international relations data. We will begin by discussing basic statistical techniques, and will gradually move to more sophisticated methods of analysis, including linear regression and models for limited dependent variables. Along the way, we will address a number of important pitfalls that can plague quantitative research. We will do all of this within the context of international relations. This approach will allow us to develop a familiarity with commonly used IR datasets, as well as with some of the most important works in empirical international relations.