I’m a political theorist who works on modern political thought and contemporary political theory. At Binghamton University, I teach courses in the interdisciplinary social sciences and humanities, contributing to undergraduate programs like the Source Project, the Scholars Program, and the Educational Opportunity Program. My currently offered courses include “The New Authoritarianism,” “Climate Justice,” “Technology, Power and Politics,” and “The Politics of Dystopia.” Much of my research focuses on the role of the imagination, especially the imagination of the future, in political thought and action, though my research agenda also extends into fields such as environmental politics, democratic theory, intellectual history, and literature.

My first book, Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century, arrives from the University of Michigan Press in August. The book examines the origins of dystopia and its role in postwar political thought, demonstrating that dystopia is not just a literary innovation but a pervasive influence on twentieth and twenty-first-century thinking about freedom, domination, and futurity. I will also contribute an introductory chapter on "Typologies of Dystopia" to the Cambridge Companion to Dystopian Literature (forthcoming 2026). I’ve published research in venues such as Contemporary Political Theory, Environmental Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and The Review of Politics, and also contributed public writing to Boston Review and the Orwell Foundation.

I’m currently working on two long-term research projects, both of which I intend to develop into monographs. The first, Another World Was Possible: A Political History of the Planetary Crisis, retrieves a global archive of radical environmentalist projects - in India, Kenya, Germany, and the United States -  which sought to defend the shared earth from the ravages of war and empire.  A second project, The Imagination of Power: Orwell and the Political Mind, asserts George Orwell's place in the history of political ideas by reconstructing his distinctive psychopolitical analysis of power and his underappreciated stewardship of the utopian socialist imaginary.

I was born in Arlington, VA, but my childhood was spent in Northern Illinois and my adolescence in South Texas, where I attended public schools and found community through theater, speech, and debate. I earned my bachelor’s degree in political science from Carleton College and my PhD in Political Science at Duke University. Before joining Binghamton, I lived in Boston for eight years while teaching with the Harvard College Writing Program at Harvard University and the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College.