I am an Assistant Professor of political theory in the Department of Political Science at Southern Methodist University. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Stanford Civics Initiative. I received my PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 2022.
My research focuses on the role of imagination in politics and in the history of political thought.
I am currently working on two book projects that aim to recover the historical meaning of this concept and show how it can enrich our study of past and present democratic practices. My first book project, The Discovery of Imagination (under advance contract with OUP), offers a new account of the earliest origins of the concept of “imagination” in archaic and classical Greece and explores its potential roles in democratic politics. It is motivated by the current global crisis of liberal democracy and the growing gaps between how democratic citizens view, interpret, and understand their social and political world. I argue that this phenomenon—often described today in terms of “deep disagreement,” “belief polarization,” or “epistemic fragmentation”—can be traced back to the earliest days of Western philosophy and that it is inextricably tied to the discovery or invention of the concept of imagination. The imagination was discovered within an environment of radical epistemic uncertainty and as part of an attempt to capture and explain how and why different individuals come to perceive the world in different ways. Recovering this untold history of imagination and situating it within the context of the ancient Athenian democracy can inform our search for democratic remedies to our own crisis of epistemic fragmentation, disagreement, and polarization.
I am also interested in the role of imagination in the history of philosophy, especially in classical, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern scientific and political thought. My work in this area has focused on Hobbes’s theory of the imagination, its historical and intellectual context, and its relationship to his political thought.
My work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and History of European Ideas, among others.
I am a charter member of the Alliance for Civics in the Academy and a Term Member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters. I also currently serve as the book review editor for Hobbes Studies.
I am a former Gerald J. Lieberman Fellow, one of Stanford University’s highest distinctions for doctoral students. I was also a Ric Weiland Graduate Fellow and a graduate fellow with Stanford’s Center for Ethics in Society and the Stanford Basic Income Lab. In 2020, I received an M.A. in classics from Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, I received a B.A. in political science and economics and an M.A. in political science from Tel Aviv University, both Summa cum Laude.