About Me

Research Interests

American Political Thought, The American Presidency, Constitutionalism, Early Modern Political Theory

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My research examines the history of political thought that influenced the American Founders, particularly with regard to the theoretical origins and development of the U.S. presidency. As a political theorist, my contribution to ongoing debates on executive power is to consider normative questions of political legitimacy that legal scholarship on the presidency neglects. My methodology melds a perspective from the history of political thought with a normative approach in order to synthesize accounts of executive power in eighteenth-century political theory and American constitutionalism. The purpose of this method is to unearth historical arguments that outline the limited duties of an energetic executive in response to foreign and domestic emergencies. I approach the American Founders’ understanding of executive power from a historical perspective, analyzing its evolution over time in different forms and interpreting authors’ intentions within the debates of their time. By combining historical and normative approaches to the texts that influenced American political thought, my work seeks to shed light on the origins and limits of executive power in American constitutionalism. Recovering these eighteenth-century and early-American understandings ought to impact the way we understand the nature of the presidency today, allowing us to better achieve constitutional moderation by balancing efficacy and accountability in the exercise of executive power.

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Prior to earning my PhD at University of Wisconsin-Madison, I earned my M.A. in Political Theory from the University of Essex and B.A. in Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy from Michigan State University.