I'm a political theorist and historian of political thought. I work on 18th-21st century debates about democracy, public opinion, and liberalism.
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My research interests include institutional design aimed at reinforcing elite accountability, the impact of technological changes on ideas of political participation, the relationship between means of communication and political emotions, and the invention of traditions.
My first monograph, The People's Two Powers: Public Opinion and Popular Sovereignty from Rousseau to Liberal Democracy, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press ("Ideas in Context" Series).
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I'm working on two projects. The first, Representatives Under Control, examines how the imperative mandate and the recall were theorized, first in Rousseau, and then across three revolutionary moments: the Revolution of 1789, the Revolution of 1848, and the Paris Commune. A pilot article on Rousseau’s conception of the recall and how it might be adapted today is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review.
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The second project, Politics Without Presence, analyzes political theorists' arguments against citizen participation through assemblies (18th-20th c) and their resonance with contemporary claims that new technologies could enable unprecedented political practices. A pilot article is out in Political Theory.
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I've also laid the groundwork for a third project, Democracy Meets Propaganda, which examines, from a transnational perspective (Russia, Europe, and the US, including Black political thought), how propaganda shifted from a legitimate tool of mobilization in the late 19th c. to a threat to the public sphere in the 1950s-60s.
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In 2024, I joined the Centre de Théorie Politique at the Université Libre de Bruxelles as an FNRS chargé de recherches. Previously, I held a British Academy fellowship at King's College London, taught at Brown and Yale, and earned my PhD from the University of Cambridge.