I was born and raised in Saunderstown, Rhode Island into a family of teachers, scholars, and writers. That sounds a bit pretentious, but it’s true. As it turns out, teaching, scholarship, and writing have become lifelong passions. Saunderstown is in between Narragansett and North Kingstown; all three are small towns in the smallest of American states.

It’s mentioned elsewhere on this website, but I’ll recap here….I earned my Bachelor’s Degree at Johns Hopkins University and my Master’s Degrees and Doctorate at Columbia University. Prior to arriving at The College of New Jersey in the fall of 2012, I held visiting positions at Bowdoin College, Mount Holyoke College, and Rutgers University. I spent my final two years in graduate school teaching in Columbia University’s Core Curriculum.

My approach to political science is insistently interdisciplinary. I think of myself as working in what Charles Tilly called the “no-man’s land at the frontiers of history and political science.” My published work is mostly the fruit of archival digs. This is a function of how I was trained—both of my graduate school mentors were interdisciplinary scholars—and how I am hard-wired. I publish in history and sociology journals, along with political science journals.

At TCNJ, I teach a variety of courses in comparative politics, international relations, and European politics, and American politics. Beginning in the fall of 2022, I’ve been teaching a seminar for first-year students called Communism and Anti-Communism in the 20th Century United States, which I’m quite proud of. In the spring of 2024, I’ll teach a political theory course for the first time in nearly 18 years, which I’m rather excited about.

My first book is called Teaching Marianne and Uncle Sam (Temple University Press, 2012). Adapted from my dissertation, the book examines the origins of public school teachers’ unions in France and the United States. Other publications from this research trajectory include articles about the origins of French teacher unionism, the history of French teacher-training institutions, the role of teachers in the politics of the French Second Republic (1848-1851), the education politics and philosophy of Alexis de Tocqueville, and, the conflicts between teachers’ unions in New York City prior to the foundation of the United Federations of Teachers (UFT).

My research about contemporary European politics focuses on political extremism. I’ve published two articles about the Greek far right Golden Dawn (now defunct), one short one for New Labor Forum and one long one for Geopolitics. I’ve also written two articles about the Greek far left Syriza (now not-so-far left), one short one for New Labor Forum and one long one for New Political Science. I wrote a still-unpublished article-length comparative study of the impact of the Hungarian and Greek extreme right parties since their electoral breakthroughs in 2010 and 2012 respectively. I look forward to revisiting this paper. My next book-length project about Europe will draw on event-data on protest politics in order to examine how the financial crisis of 2008-2013 has had lasting impact on patterns of popular protest within the European Union.

I have an on-again, off-again interest in the comparative political economy scholarship. About a decade ago, I dipped my toes into quantitative research, with a short article about the determinants of the size of fiscal stimulus measures during the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009. I’ve also got an unpublished paper that examines how the structure of welfare states and patterns of party system change shaped the context of fiscal stimulus measures in three countries—Denmark, France, and the UK—during this period. I’m slowly assembling materials for a review article about recent trends in the scholarship on the world’s wealthy capitalist democracies. A scholarly goal is to bring the elite-centered, institutional political economy scholarship into dialogue with the literature on contentious politics, and I’m planning to make this review article a first step in that direction.

Over the past seven years, I’ve been slowly but surely working on a new book about teachers’ unions. Tentatively titled Philadelphia Reds: Communist Teachers in the City of Brotherly Love, this book is about the Philadelphia Teachers Union, a Communist Party-affiliated organization.

The research for Philadelphia Reds was funded by the Spencer Foundation (Grant #201900103). If you want to hear me talk more about the Philadelphia Teachers Union, you can listen to an NPR podcast that I contributed to about the firing of Philadelphia schoolteachers after their appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953: https://whyy.org/episodes/schooled-red-tape-the-untold-stories-of-philadelphias-1950s-teacher-purge/

If you’d like any more information about my work, please feel free to e-mail me. I’d be happy to answer your questions.