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Welcome! I’m a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago, where my research focuses on international law, security studies, and foreign policy. My work is chiefly focused on how states use international law strategically to achieve outcomes, how they are in turn shaped by the rules of the international system, and how the strategic use of international law shapes the content of future law itself. My work brings together historical case studies, legal analysis, and archival methods to examine how states use legal labels in times of war and crisis.

When do states legally see themselves as at war? Why are so many conflicts characterized by euphemistic labels – “special military operations,” “quarantines,” “crisis,” or “quasi-wars”? When do states choose to break glass and reach for more extreme labels of a “state of war” or “civil war”? My dissertation leverages historical cases over the past two centuries to examine how states use legal labels to classify their conflicts, looking at cases of both interstate and intrastate wars and the legal set of terminology that has evolved to describe them. I particularly focus on cases where the labels are deployed strategically and at odds with the underlying material realty on the ground. I find that far from being restraining, international law is often used as an empowering tool both through through direct legal powers and and indirect symbolic effects.

Beyond my work on international law, my interests include decision-making over the use of force, limited war and conflict escalation, bureaucracy, intelligence, and international order.

Before graduate school, I worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., where I contributed to policy research on U.S. military force structure, national security strategy, and industrial mobilization. That experience continues to inform my academic work, which aims to produce theoretically informed questions with policy relevance.