Research

My research focuses on early U.S. relations with Native American groups and the place of these interactions in the study U.S. foreign policy. My first monograph, American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy, focuses on the processes by which U.S. settlers instigated the Northwest Indian War of 1790-1795, the political legacies of this conflict, and continuing efforts to legitimize the U.S. victory. In so doing, I argue against the conventional wisdom that the United States was isolationist in its early years. My most recent publications intervene in debates on whether some Native American groups constituted empires and examine Indigenous political thought in video games. My current book project compares and contrasts the foreign policies that emerge from the nativist revitalization movements of Tecumseh and Donald Trump.

Publications

  • “‘Interconnectedness and interdependence’: Never Alone, Thunderbird Strike, and Indigenous Relationalism in Video Games,” International Political Sociology (forthcoming).
  • “What’s at Stake in the Indigenous Empire Debate,” Global Studies Quarterly (forthcoming).
  • American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Stanford University Press, 2025).
  • “Teaching in Context” in Michael P.A. Murphy and Misbah Hyder, eds., Teaching Political Science and International Relations for Early Career Instructors (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024): 279-292.
  • (with So Jin Lee) “Staff Rides as Pedagogical Practice,” PS: Political Science and Politics Vol. 57, no. 3 (2024): 435-439.
  • (with Tobias Lemke, Jessica Auchter, Alexander D. Barder, Daniel Green, Stephen Pampinella, and Swati Srivastava) “Doing Historical International Relations,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs Vol. 36, no. 1 (2023): 3-34.
  • “Foreign or Domestic? The Desecuritisation of Indian Affairs and Normativity in Securitization Theory,” Millennium Vol. 50, no. 3 (2022): 785-809.
  • Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations amid COVID-19 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) (editor and contributor).
  • “Do Accidental Wars Happen? Evidence From America’s Indian Wars,” Journal of Global Security Studies 6, 4 (2021).
  • “Bringing (Inter)National History into ‘Introduction to International Relations’,” Learning and Teaching 14, 3 (2021): 91-104.
  • (with Matthew E. Carnes) “Assessing an Undergraduate Curriculum: The Evolving Roles of Subfields, Methods, Ethics, and Writing for Government Majors,” PS: Political Science and Politics 50, 1 (2018): 178-182.

Book Reviews and Public-facing Publications

  • Introduction to H-Diplo Roundtable Review of Mark Shirk’s Making War on the World: How Transnational Violence Reshapes Global Order (February 9, 2026).
  • Review of Base Towns: Local Contestation of the U.S. Military in Korea and Japan by Claudia Junghyun Kim, E-IR (April 2, 2025).
  • Review of Making Global Society: A Study of Humankind Across Three Eras by Barry Buzan, Political Studies Quarterly (2025).
  • “What Does Andor Believe?” The Duck of Minerva (February 9, 2023)
  • (with John Arquilla) “Accidents and Escalation in a Cyber Age,” War on the Rocks (December 22, 2021)
  • “Responding to Chinese ‘Whataboutism’: On Uyghur and Native Genocides,” The Diplomat (February 3, 2021).
  • Review of A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History: American Wests, Global Wests, and Indian Wars by Carroll P. Kakel III, American Indian Quarterly (Summer 2020).
  • “Bringing Indigenous Experiences into International Relations,” The Duck of Minerva (September 12, 2019).
  • “Syria, Afghanistan, and the Lessons of the Indian Wars,” op-ed, Indian Country Today (February 11, 2019).
  • A full list of public-facing publications is available upon request.

Works in Progress

  • “Role-Playing Indigeneity: Resistance, Alterity, and Tragedy in Assassin’s Creed III” (chapter under review for edited volume on role-playing games and world politics).
  • “Making (Native) America Great Again: Tecumseh, Trump, and Nativism as Foreign Policy” (working paper presented at Virtual ISA 2025 and to be presented at ISA 2026).

I have been a term blogger at The Duck of Minerva since March 2023. My introductory post is here, and subsequent posts will be linked to my author profile there.