I am a scholar and teacher of American policy and politics, with primary substantive expertise in environmental policy, political parties, and policing. I work in the tradition of American Political Development (APD), which shapes my approach to both teaching and research. After earning my doctorate in Political Science from the University of Oregon in 2015, I taught in environmental studies programs at three liberal arts colleges—Amherst, Goucher, and Lafayette Colleges—and served as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the department’s Public Policy and Management Program at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). When my personal life took me to Albuquerque in 2021, I transitioned to public service at the Albuquerque Police Department, where I oversaw police training and Training Academy compliance with a federal consent decree. I currently work for the New Mexico Department of Environment, where I oversee the development of state air quality regulations.
I have an active research agenda that comprises three projects. The first, which builds on my dissertation research, focuses on environmental policy and is informed by my APD approach to American politics. My dissertation examined the evolution of American forest policy and contestation over the locus of policy control. A selection of this work, “Democracy, Legitimacy, and Scale: Examining Habermas’ Administrative Turn through the Case of U.S. Forest Policy,” was published in Administrative Theory & Praxis. My current work builds on this foundation and uses historical methods, including archival research and discourse analysis, to trace the evolution of environmental policy and politics in the twentieth century U.S., with a focus on the role of partisanship. I have begun work on a book manuscript on the emergence and evolution of environmental partisanship. This project, spanning 1901 to the present, uses archival research to illustrate how political partisans—both in government and in party structures—forged their environmental ideologies and codified them in policies and political institutions. This work both situates in history and explains the contemporary partisan divide on environment. An article based on this work, “The Trump Administration and Environmental Policy: Reagan Redux?” was published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. Two related working papers explore the evolution of partisan environmental ideology through analysis of party platforms and the role of the 1956-1960 Democratic National Committee in politicizing conservation, respectively.
My second area of research, with co-author Adam Hilton, addresses political parties from an APD perspective. We published one article, have another article that we are revising for an R&R, and have an edited volume, Parties, Power, and Change: Developmental Approaches to American Party Politics, that was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2025. In these works, we introduce a theoretical framework for understanding political parties, reframing them as contentious institutions subject to rival claims from both politicians and interest groups. To manage contention, win elections, and govern, partisan political entrepreneurs construct and maintain party orders—durable institutional and ideational arrangements that foster intraparty cohesion across time. These party actors continuously endeavor to discipline and shape the five dimensions of party—organizational form, ideological foundation, interest group base, issue positions, and identity—in order to maintain power. Contrary to prevailing theories of parties that treat parties as symmetrically shaped by exogenous and endogenous forces, this historically-grounded understanding of parties as ordered through time allows us to explain the contemporary asymmetric polarization of the Democratic and Republican parties. This framework provides the theoretical backbone of my environmental partisanship book project.
My final research project emerges from my work at the Albuquerque Police Department, where I managed the development of all police training, co-developed training on high liability subjects, like use of force, and ensured that training complied with the federal consent decree. This experience, as essentially an embedded political ethnographer, gave me an inside view of the administrative, organizational, and behavioral consequences of federal oversight, the nuts-and-bolts implementation of police reform, and the bureaucratic pathologies of police agencies. In my role developing training, I was intimately engaged in substantive questions that drive national debates about policing, including use of force and community policing, as well as pedagogical questions about the best ways to train police cadets and experienced officers. I also developed and taught courses on constitutional law and community-oriented policing to police cadets. Based on this experience, I have begun work on a research project that explores the dilemmas of contemporary policing. The project connects overarching questions about the role of policing in contemporary American society to on-the-ground decisions about agency organization, policy, and training.