I am a political theorist specializing in the legal history of democratic ideas and institutions. I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and began a Junior Research Fellowship at St. Anne’s College in Political Thought in 2023. My research interrogates the ways contemporary social science, political institutions, and ideas are constrained by assumptions about secularization: we know that politics often took ideas from theology and the Church, but we’re often mistaken about how much sacred content was successfully—or was intended to be—removed from it. Recovering imperfect and heterogeneous processes of secularization highlights the ways in which international law, public law, and democratic theory are still playing by rules created by, or borrowed from, religion.

My first book project, titled Ghost of the Empire: Church, Law and Public Sphere, 1300-1650 examines the curious roles of the Church in medieval, renaissance, and early modern law. My second book project, titled Accountability: A Legal and Theological History, offers a genealogy of contemporary conceptions of accountability as employed by social scientists, arguing that current “accounts” of electoral, institutional, and financial accountability elide essential aspects of its historical development. Before “accountability” existed as a word, its composites (‘rendering account’, ‘to reckon’, and ‘to render an account’) trace back through medieval electoral law, ecclesiastical pastoral manuals, theological commentaries on the Last Judgment (and illustrations thereof!), and Roman private and public legal relationships.

I teach broadly in History and Politics, including Intro to Theory of Politics, Theory of Politics, and Marx and Marxism.