Teaching

I love teaching and have taught at elite public and private universities. While at the University of Arizona, for instance, I received the highest evaluations in the department for my work. And at Penn I designed a new kind of Capstone class that was written up in Penn Today. I have facility teaching across political science, having taught classes in social contract theory, Great Books, game theory, and formal modeling.

Statement

My teaching ethos straddles a desire for students to engage in close readings of texts while considering the abstract analytic models to which those texts conform. When I first got to Michigan a colleague asked me why political theorists still read stuff written thousands of years ago, while empirical political scientists rarely read anything written before the nineties. I answered that political theory considers how people reflect on their participation in public forums. That’s an experience that hasn’t changed much. Empirical political science is concerned with establishing the fact of the matter. That’s something we’ve gotten much better at. I aim to teach students to use the current statistical and formal technology in concert with these more venerable texts.

I see my work drawing from the former to inform the latter. After teaching Hobbes and Locke, for instance, I assign James Fearon and David Laitin’s “Explaining Interethnic Cooperation” (1996) to demonstrate that the concerns of political theorists hundreds of years ago are still addressed now, albeit using a different symbolic language. (The upshot: disagreements regarding the state of nature can be thought of as different SGPNE in repeated play.) For similar reasons I incorporate contemporary media and technology into my courses, so students reflect on how these theoretical concerns play out in television, movies, and other platforms that they encounter every day. For instance, I’ve made my students work in groups to produce podcast episodes, sometimes to stunning result.