I also hold an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego, and an M.Sc. in Human Rights, with distinction, from the London School of Economics and Political Science. At LSE, I won the Stan Cohen Memorial Prize for best human rights dissertation. I received my B.A. in Political Science and International Affairs, with a minor in political philosophy, and with honors, from Florida State University.

I am concurrently an Instructor of Record at UC San Diego and a Lecturer at San Diego State University. I teach historical and contemporary political theory, at both the introductory and upper-division levels. I also teach an upper-division course on the politics of human rights. In addition, I have worked regularly as a teaching assistant in every substantive subfield of political science and was recognized with a TA Excellence Award by the UC San Diego Department of Political Science.

Research

Interests

Political authority and legitimacy; rights; moral and political foundations of human rights; international political theory; the international politics of human protection and assistance; international institutions

Working papers

“Human Rights and Political Legitimacy in Rawls’s Law of Peoples“

The conventional reading of Rawls’s international theory treats human rights as downstream from practice, as the products of consensus among peoples, or as defined by their international function. This paper argues that this is a misreading of Rawls. Correctly interpreted, Rawlsian human rights are the minimum conditions for the exercise of legitimate political authority as justificatory rule. This reconstruction explains what the conventional reading cannot: why the list is fixed and minimalist, and why it is universally binding without presupposing a thick liberal-moral anthropology.

APSA Annual Meeting, September 2026
MPSA Annual Meeting, April 2026
WPSA Annual Meeting, April 2026
UC San Diego Political Theory Workshop, December 2025

“The Authority of Human Rights”

Debate in human rights theory has long been shaped by a dilemma. Naturalistic accounts secure normative force, but at the cost of leaning on controversial moral conceptions of the person. Practice-dependent accounts secure non-parochial universality, but at the cost of critical purchase on the practices they describe. A reconciliation literature has emerged attempting to carve a path through the horns of the dilemma, but theorists nonetheless inherit one of the two costs. This paper argues that a third path remains to be explored: that human rights can be theorized independently of any moral conceptions of persons and prior to practice, finding grounds instead in the structure of political authority relations. I develop a constitutive-rights-authority thesis that satisfies the commonest cited desiderata for a theory of human rights, while also overcoming these vulnerabilities.

UC San Diego Political Theory Workshop, June 2026

Work In Progress

“Authorship or Acceptance? Rawls’s International Original Position, Revisited”

Standard interpretations of Rawls’s Law of Peoples treat liberal and decent peoples as joint authors of the principles governing international society. This paper argues that the text, interpreted alongside Political Liberalism, supports a different reading: liberal peoples alone generate the Law through the international original position while decent peoples independently satisfy a threshold for decency, or basic legitimacy, and are accepted into the Society of Peoples on that basis. This reading of the text dissolves a longstanding cosmopolitan critique of Rawls’s international political theory, but reveals a deeper puzzle about the grounds of international legitimacy.

“Consent and Compliance, or Contestation? Rethinking the Legitimacy of International Human Rights Institutions”

Extant literature evaluates the legitimacy of international human rights institutions by consent and compliance. This paper proposes a different standard: justificatory orientation, evidenced by persistent contestation. States that argue within an institution, rather than simply ignoring or rejecting it outright, thereby recognize it as an authoritative arena in which claims must be made and answered on terms independent of their will.

Teaching

Recognition

Specialist-Level Certificate, Student-Centered College Teaching & Course Design, UC San Diego

TA Excellence Award, Department of Political Science, UC San Diego

Experience

Instructor of Record, UC San Diego

Power and Justice (Spring 2026, Winter 2026 planned)

The Politics of Human Rights (Summer I 2026)

Lecturer, San Diego State University

Modern Political Thought (Fall 2026, Spring 2026)

Teaching/Instructional Assistant, UC San Diego

Discussion Leader
Bending the Curve: Solutions to Climate Change (Summer II 2024, Summer II 2025, Winter 2026), Introduction to International Relations (Fall 2025), Power and Justice (Fall 2024), Ethics & Society II (Winter 2023), Ethics & Society I (Fall 2022)

Grader (with office hours)
Ethics and Society II (Summer II 2026), Power and Justice (Summer I 2024, Summer I 2025), Chinese and Japanese Political Thought (Summer II 2024), Weapons of Mass Destruction (Spring 2024), Marxist Political Thought (Winter 2024), Global Justice: Theory and Action (Fall 2023), Gender, Globalization, and Politics (Spring 2023), European Integration (Fall 2021)

Grader
Sovereigns, Subjects, and the Modern State: Political Thought from Machiavelli to Rousseau (Summer II 2022), Revolution and Reaction: Political Thought from Kant to Nietzsche (Summer I 2022), American Political Development (Spring 2022), Election Law (Winter 2022)