Teaching

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses at Carnegie Mellon University on American politics, representation and voting rights, constitutional law, elections, and quantitative methods. Several serve as Dietrich College general-education courses.

Teaching Philosophy

The best courses I took as a student weren't the ones where I memorized definitions — they were the ones that pushed me to get uncomfortable with what I thought I already knew. That drives how I teach. My goal isn't simply to transfer information, but to model how scholars actually think: how they weigh evidence, interrogate assumptions, revise arguments, and take disagreement seriously. That asks students to do more than listen. They talk, collaborate, and test their ideas in public — pushing back not just on each other, but on the readings, the scholarly consensus, and me.

As a first-generation college student, I remember walking into a seminar room unsure whether I belonged. I work to ensure that students from different backgrounds and levels of preparation feel their contributions carry equal intellectual weight — varying formats so that students who think best out loud and those who do their strongest work in writing each have a way in, assigning low- or no-cost readings, and building flexibility into my courses without lowering the bar. Above all, I want classrooms where disagreement is taken seriously and handled respectfully, where I engage arguments I disagree with in good faith and treat students' perspectives as genuine contributions to the work of the course.

That approach has found an audience: my courses are regularly among the most highly enrolled in the department, and I am now helping to design Carnegie Mellon's American Politics curriculum. The relationship between my teaching and research is reciprocal — students raise questions that complicate my own arguments, and an active research program lets me show them that what they encounter in class are live debates with real consequences for law, policy, and democratic governance.

Courses