I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Augusta University, Department of Social Sciences. My research sits at the intersection of international security, political violence, information politics, and computational social science. Broadly, I am interested in how political actors use information, ideology, and violence to pursue political goals, and in how new computational tools can help us understand the process.
One strand of my research examines propaganda, political rhetoric, and information in authoritarian regimes. I study how authoritarian governments construct political narratives, how those narratives are communicated through traditional and digital media, and how they shape political attitudes and behavior. A second strand of my work focuses on political violence and conflict, including the role of ideology in insurgent violence, terrorism, and the dynamics of interstate conflict.
Methodologically, I am interested in combining social science questions with advances in text analysis, machine learning, and large language models. My recent work explores both the use of large language models as research tools for political scientists and the broader opportunities and limitations of computational approaches to studying political text and events. My research has appeared in journals including Journal of Peace Research, International Interactions, Civil Wars, Social Media + Society, and more. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Iowa.
At Augusta University, I teach in the Master of Arts in Intelligence and Security Studies (MAISS) program, where my courses connect substantive questions in security and intelligence with contemporary analytical methods. My graduate teaching includes courses on propaganda and information warfare, cyber conflict, environmental security, social media text analysis, and social network analysis. Across these courses, I emphasize the integration of theory with empirical evidence and encourage students to develop practical skills in analyzing political information, emerging security challenges, and complex social and computational data.