Teaching

Classrooms have been among the most formative spaces in my academic life. They shaped how I learned to think, how I found intellectual community, and how I came to understand education as a form of social mobility. For that reason, teaching is not something I see as separate from research. I believe that we often understand an idea most fully when we have to explain it clearly to others, respond to confusion, and make abstract concepts feel usable. This is especially true in methods courses, where students often arrive with anxiety about statistics or math. I enjoy helping students see that these tools are not obstacles to substantive inquiry, but ways of asking better questions about politics.
At Vanderbilt, I have worked as a teaching assistant in the PhD quantitative methods sequence and as lead instructor for Math Camp for incoming doctoral students. I have also contributed to undergraduate courses in political behavior, democratic erosion, American politics, music and politics, and global inequality. Across these experiences, my goal has been to make the classroom rigorous, generous, and intellectually alive: a place where students can learn difficult material without feeling that difficulty is a sign that they do not belong.