teaching

Teaching Ethos

My teaching is grounded in the belief that students learn international relations best by reading, arguing, and writing. My courses are discussion-based and student-led. I design structured conversations that ask students to grapple with competing theoretical frameworks, evaluate evidence, and defend their own positions. Writing is central to this process. I treat every writing assignment as an opportunity to help students develop the analytical habits they will carry well beyond the classroom.


My research on racism in international institutions shapes how I approach difficult conversations in the classroom. I create structured space for students to engage with questions of race, power, and hierarchy in world politics, topics that are often either avoided or handled without sufficient care. My goal is not to foreclose debate but to ensure it is grounded in evidence and conducted with intellectual honesty. Students in my courses learn that discomfort with hard questions is a starting point for inquiry, not a reason to avoid it.


I want students to leave my courses with genuine confidence engaging complex theory. International relations scholarship can feel abstract and inaccessible, but I believe every student is capable of reading, critiquing, and contributing to it. I aim to make the field accessible while fostering intellectual ambition.

Course Proposals

  • Hierarchy in International Politics This course introduces first- and second-year students to the study of international politics through the lens of race and hierarchy. Standard accounts of the international system, anarchy, sovereign equality, the balance of power, rarely treat race as a category of analysis in its own right. This course asks students to hold the major theoretical traditions of IR up to that question: what did realist accounts of anarchy assume about which polities counted as full members of the interstate system? How did architects of the liberal international order square its universalist language with the colonial holdings its founders still administered? What can constructivist accounts of norms and identity add to our understanding of both the construction of racial hierarchy and its contestation? No prior coursework is required. The course is designed as a genuine point of entry into the discipline.

Courses Taught

  • IAFF 1005: Introduction to International Affairs [Teaching Assistant] — ESIA George Washington University, [Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025]
  • PSC 2449W - International Security Politics [Teaching Assistant] — George Washington University, [Fall 2025]

Courses Available to Teach

  • International Human Rights
  • International Relations Theory
  • Race and World Politics
  • Global Governance and International Law
  • Transnational Advocacy and Human Rights