Below is a list of teaching materials separated into two categories: courses I have taught or am teaching and courses for which I have served as teaching assistant.
Instructor of Record
"Political Authority and the Rule of Law" (Fall 2025)
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course explores the contested relationship between sovereignty and the rule of law. Through close readings of foundational texts, students will examine how political authority is constituted, justified, and constrained across historical and theoretical contexts. We will consider questions such as: What legitimates sovereign power? Can law bind the sovereign? How do liberty and legal authority coexist? The first part of the course surveys the early modern theories of Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The second unit examines the ways in which the American founders approached the tensions, in theory and practice, between the need for political authority and the maintenance of the rule of law. The third section turns to the Weimar crisis, where legal theorists like Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt, and Hermann Heller developed diametrically opposed accounts of sovereignty and the rule of law. Finally, the course turns to contemporary debates about sovereignty and the rule of law in the twenty-first century. Throughout the course, students will develop analytical skills in political and legal theory, sharpen their writing through two essays, and engage in critical discussion of enduring issues at the heart of modern political life.
"Great Books Seminar III" (Fall 2025)
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Continuing from Great Books Seminar II, and the first in the junior seminar sequence, this course focuses on great works of the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The texts include Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God, Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, Machiavelli’s The Prince, More’s Utopia, Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and selections from Petrarch, Chaucer, Luther, and Montaigne.
"Introduction to Political Theory" (Spring 2025)
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course introduces students to political theory through an examination of some of the most influential texts of Western political thought. The first part investigates the birth of political philosophy in ancient Greece, beginning with Hesiod’s mytho-poetic account of the world before exploring a few Socratic questions raised by it and their relation to the trial and death of Socrates at the hands of his fellow citizens. The second part of the course turns from the origins of philosophy to the systematic treatment of political questions by philosophers. Drawing primarily upon Aristotle, it explores questions of who should rule, the nature of justice, varieties of regime, civil strife, and revolution. The third part then takes up the problem of tyranny. It begins with Plato’s account of the devolution of regimes from philosophical rulership at its highest to tyranny at its lowest. With Xenophon, it then raises the question of whether tyranny benefits the tyrant who succeeds in grasping it. Section four then turns to the education of a ruler through a close reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince and selections from his Discourses on Livy. Section five then examines early modern theories of the state, while part six explores the aftereffects of enlightenment ideas on modern politics. Finally, section seven returns to the question of philosophy’s role in politics through the writings of Hannah Arendt.
"War and Peace in Modern Political Thought" (Fall 2024)
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Why do wars occur? Are there fundamental differences between interstate and civil wars? What can the prevalence and persistence of war teach us about politics? Is a more peaceful world possible? If so, how might we achieve it? This course explores these and related questions through a selection of readings from the history of modern political thought. Beginning with Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, and Spinoza, the course examines the origins of a secular science of war and peace in the early modern period. It then turns to the economic, geographic, military, and gender determinants of war and peace in Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft before taking up the question of perpetual peace in Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. It ends with an examination of nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism through the writings of Nietzsche, Lenin, Arendt, and Du Bois along with antecedents to contemporary international relations theory in Morgenthau, Butterfield, and Herz.
