I have taught courses on international relations, grand strategy, and foreign policy decision-making at Princeton and Columbia. In 2024 I received the George Kateb Preceptor Award, given by Princeton’s Department of Politics to the best graduate student instructors each year.
A summary of my student evaluations can be viewed here, and the complete evaluations can be viewed here.
Teaching Experience:
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Princeton University, co-instructor with G. John Ikenberry and John de Bhal
Seminar: 12 students (mixed, undergraduate and graduate)
Lecturer and Lead Instructor for 4 weeks:
International Order in the 19th Century
International Order in the Interwar Period
The Long 1990s
Alternatives to the State System
Course description: International order encompasses the governing arrangements that organize relations among states, including the fundamental rules, principles, and institutions of the international system. This course draws on a wide range of readings in International Relations theory as well as diplomatic and global history to consider plausible accounts of the emergence, development, and decline of international orders across human history. The course will review prominent theories of international order, explore crucial junctures of order formation and decline, and consider the sociology and causal mechanics of pivotal institutions of international order.
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Columbia University, with Keren Yarhi-Milo and Hillary Rodham Clinton
2 sections, 53 students (graduate level)
Average student evaluation: 4.85/5
Student evaluations can be viewed here.
Course description: In an era increasingly defined by geopolitical competition, it is more important than ever for future policymakers to understand why and how foreign policy decisions are made. Inside the Situation Room, co-taught by Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, employs insights from diverse academic fields—including political psychology, domestic politics, and international relations—and the direct experience of high level principals in the room to understand the key factors which underpin a nation’s most crucial decisions. This course allows students to engage with a range of case studies and examine decision-making in a variety of historical and contemporary contexts, from the search for Osama bin Laden, to the “red line” in Syria, to negotiating with Iran.
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Princeton University, with G. John Ikenberry
3 sections, 35 students
Average student evaluation: 4.7/5
Student evaluations can be viewed here.
Course description: Grand strategy is the broad and encompassing policies and undertakings that political leaders pursue- financial, economic, military, diplomatic- to achieve their objectives in peacetime and in war. This course will examine the theory and practice of grand strategy both to illuminate how relations among city-states, empires, kingdoms and nation states have evolved over the centuries and also to identify some common challenges that have confronted all who seek to make and execute grand strategy from Pericles to Barack Obama.
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Princeton University, with G. John Ikenberry and Aaron Friedberg
3 sections, 32 students
Average student evaluation: 4.8/5
Student evaluations can be viewed here.
Course description: Grand strategy is the broad and encompassing policies and undertakings that political leaders pursue—financial, economic, military, diplomatic—to achieve their objectives in peacetime and in war. This course will examine the theory and practice of grand strategy both to illuminate how relations among city-states, empires, kingdoms and nation states have evolved over the centuries and also to identify some common challenges that have confronted all who seek to make and execute grand strategy from Pericles to Barack Obama.
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Princeton University, with Andrew Moravcsik
2 sections, 22 students
Average student evaluation: 4.4/5
Student evaluations can be viewed here.
Course description: This course introduces major theories of international relations, uses them to explain historical events from 10,000 BC to the present, and investigates contemporary policy issues such as human rights, terrorism, US foreign policy, climate change and global environmental regulation. The course also trains students how to write academic analyses, policy memos and media opinion pieces, thus preparing them for more specialized courses and research in international relations, as well as jobs in foreign policy.