I earned my doctorate in political science from Indiana University in June 2025, with specializations in international relations and comparative politics and a Ph.D. minor in social science research methods. However, my higher education journey started at Salem Community College in southern New Jersey as a first-generation student completing an associate’s degree in history and political science. My credentials also include a master’s degree in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from the University of Kansas and a bachelor’s in political science from Texas Tech University.

Along the way, I have subscribed to a generalist approach, in which one can still become a subject expert while also knowing a little about a lot, meaning I focus on expanding both the depth and breadth of my knowledge. However, I am first and foremost a scholar of international relations. The underlying question that drives much of my research agenda can be summed up as such: how do political leaders achieve their foreign policy goals without resorting to coercion and/or use of force? Put another way, how do states, particularly small powers, navigate the international system to obviate or at least minimize the negative impacts of their structural disadvantages?

Much of the foundational work in International Relations as a sub-field focused exclusively on great power politics, and that focus remains very much at the forefront of the contemporary study of world politics. I willingly admit that my own interest in political science can be traced directly to a fascination with the relations between empires. However, my focus has always been on the diplomatic maneuvering that enabled rulers and/or governments to obtain favorable outcomes without recourse to war. War may be an extension of politics, as Clausewitz argued, but it is not the entirety of politics. The vast majority of international relations occurs outside the realm of armed conflict.

While there are certainly coercive methods beyond violence, my work revolves primarily around non-coercive means of international influence. Topics of interest include international sport, cross-border educational cooperation, and rhetoric about international affairs employed by political leaders. The non-coercive subset of foreign policy tools is available to all states and leaders, opening the door to a considerably broader spectrum of case studies than just a handful of major powers.

That does not mean I completely eschew research on materially powerful countries. Coupled with my interest in non-coercive influence, an extensive area studies background informs my work: I have focused most of my research efforts on the many minor powers that gained their independent sovereignty with the fall of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan and Russia, including post-colonial relations between the two countries, were key focal points during my graduate studies and continue to be of interest to me. More recently, I have expanded my scope to include Hungary and other (particularly southern and eastern) European states. In line with my generalist philosophy, I prefer an academic approach to research topics grounded in deep regional expertise, but with the flexibility to apply my (less in-depth) knowledge of other states and regions to tease out potential parallels.

As implied in the above section about my research interests, I lean far more positivist than interpretivist in my ontological beliefs. However, my view of social science most closely aligns with scientific realism: we as scholars are attempting to describe an objective reality and that, in so doing, we are producing knowledge, yet there are phenomena that defy the possibility of observation and thus understanding.

I take as my starting point the idea that just because something does not fit into our existing understanding does not mean that we have observed it incorrectly. Yet we need to be able to differentiate misleading observations from those that reveal actual insights: I personally think of it in terms of the mythical jackalope (a mix of a jack rabbit and an antelope, for my non-North American readers) being accepted by some as real despite simply being the creation of a bored taxidermist while the platypus, which Europeans were originally convinced must be a taxidermical hoax, is well and truly a naturally occurring species.

In an effort to sort through what is a methodological artefact and what is an accurate representation of reality, much like the many-faceted platypus, I am wholeheartedly eclectic (Sil & Katzenstein 2010) in my analytical approach. I have training in numerous quantitative and qualitative methods from across different social science disciplines, and I often rely on a mixed- or multi-method approach in my work. These methods include: linear and logistic regression; historical process tracing; (social) network analysis, including exponential random graph models; geographic information systems tools; content and textual analysis; interviews; surveys; and causal models.

As part of this methodological pluralism, I am also comfortable working with a wide array of data types. These range from voting patterns to economic indicators to political speeches, and from geolocation and climate information to biographical records to international academic partnerships. While I understand that not every data type will be available or appropriate in every instance, I am of the firm opinion that being able to identify, organize, clean, and work with myriad data pertinent to the same phenomenon is the best way for actually producing meaningful answers to the questions political scientists (and other social scientists) are investigating. At the same time, I consider any pursuit of social scientific “laws”–usually involving large-N studies that rely on probabilistic inferences to assert absolutes–a fool’s errand, and I have no qualms saying as much.

As for specific programs, I am an advocate for and (financial) supporter of open access software. I have experience with JavaScript and Python, but most of my coding work is done in R Studio to ensure that my replication scripts are available to as many people as possible since they can be run in a freely accessible program. However, I must admit to primarily using ArcGIS for analyzing geographical data, although I do sometimes work in QGIS instead.

In my view, scholarship is a collaborative endeavor, and I see no reason to hoard my data, stymieing others who might even be able to make better use of it than myself. I relied heavily on publicly available materials for my dissertation, and I continue to make extensive use of non-proprietary information. Thus, I make my own datasets available both on this website and as part of the supplemental materials for my published articles in an effort to pay it forward and contribute to the collegial pursuit of knowledge.

Just as I proudly embrace my status as a first-generation scholar, I also gladly adopt the moniker of an independent scholar: I do not want my life to be defined or consumed by my research. I work a rewarding full-time job, so I only pursue the backlog of research projects that had to be set aside during grad school in my free time. Scholarly activities are something I have a strong passion for, but I have seen seen too many embittered scholars who now find their research endeavors a source of stress rather than pleasure because of the pressure to constantly produce new publications, without regard for the actual merits of a given article. Many times, this shift happens well before their doctorate has even been awarded, becoming more acute during the pre-tenure process and continuing even beyond the milestone of achieving tenure. I have no interest in publishing just to publish: I want anything I submit to a journal to be both well thought out and carefully researched, that is, something I feel proud to put my name on. I work on projects I find to be engaging, the ones which elicit that scholarly joy of discovery while I work on them.

Not surprisingly, then, I have many pursuits outside of the purely academic realm that still feed into my work as a scholar. I am an avid language learner, having dabbled in Kazakh, Spanish, German, Arabic, and Hindi, in addition to intermediate proficiency in Chinese and advanced Russian proficiency. I even lived in Moscow for the better part of 2 years before leaving amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. I have received multiple grants to further my language study, and I have relied heavily on my Russian language skills for multiple research projects, as well as utilizing Kazakh and Chinese to a lesser extent at times.

I enjoy hiking and simply being in nature, and countless hours of my grad school years were spent sitting on a bench in the more forested areas of eastern Kansas or southern Indiana writing seminar papers, grading exams, organizing datasets, etc. Lake Baikal remains the single most beautiful nature spot I have visited to date, but I would be remiss not to mention the inspiration I took from the breathtakingly gorgeous scenery of the Slovenian (Julian) Alps and the expansive wild sunflower fields of Hungary as I completely rewrote my prospectus during a pre-dissertation research trip.

Relatedly, and completely coincidental to the fact that I completed my doctorate in Indiana, the same state where Bob Ross brought the Joy of Painting to the world, I took up painting as my primary creative release in the latter half of my Ph.D. program. I have found it helps immensely to have another creative outlet to get one’s mind working in order to avoid burnout and/or overcome stagnation while working on academic projects. Painting was and remains my go-to form of creativity, but it is certainly not the only one. Other artistic hobbies include (molten) glass art, pottery, and beadwork.

I also enjoy puzzles and games, which is something that drew me to an academic path in the first place: the quest to solve puzzling conundrums. While I still question the New York Times spending over a million dollars to purchase the rights to Wordle when versions of the game have existed at least since I was a kid (I highly recommend Bookworm Adventures 2 if you can find it), I do enjoy almost any word game. I am also a remorseless pun aficionado.

Board games, particularly strategy games, are an invigorating pastime that also get my brain thinking in new and different ways, which has more than once proved vital in allowing me to rethink how I approached a research project. Here’s a shameless plug for Yucata, which provides a free, ad-free board gaming experience with players around the world without the stress of a turn timer. (You can also email me if you want to add me as a friend on there.)

Of course, this section only covers the tip of the iceberg for my ever-expanding list of hobbies, from designing custom hockey jerseys for my collection to reading books for fun again after grad school, but this is still a scholarly website at its core, so I have cut the list short here.