Courses taught at the undergraduate level
Comparative Political Economy of the Energy Transition
This class is an introduction to the political economy of energy and environment through the lens of climate policy and the clean energy transition. The course examines how politics shapes and is shaped by the energy transition, both in the United States and across a variety of sovereign contexts, ranging from emerging to advanced authoritarian or democratic countries and tribal nations.
Climate and Extractive Politics
This senior seminar is an evaluation of the politics of oil and other fossil fuels fuels in the context of the clean energy transition. Course topics include the fundamentals of the energy transition as well as the political consequences of extractive resource wealth, along with the politics of decarbonization, "net zero" targets, obstacles to moving away from fossil fuels, and an assessment of how energy policy is implemented in practice.
Introduction to Research in Political Science
This lecture is an introduction to research methods in political science. The goal of the course is to understand the processes that political scientists and social scientists in general use to test theories and discover patterns in data.
Courses taught at the graduate level
Political Economy of Energy and Environment
What is the role of business in the energy transition? How do firms shape policy towards or against climate and environmental regulation? Are firms shaped by policy effectively? How do firms and governments coordinate on decarbonization? This seminar analyzes the political economy of energy and environment through the lens of business actors and their role in climate politics.
Political Research Methods I
TThis class is the first course in a three-course quantitative methods sequence for political science graduate students. Topic include introductory causal inference, descriptive statistics, sampling, conditional probability, hypothesis testing, and a foray into ordinary least squares regression.
Political Research Methods II
This seminar is an intermediate course on statistical analysis to make evidence-based claims in political science issues. The course is bookended by an introduction and review of research design, with a topical focus on the promises and perils of multivariate regression and generalized linear models.
Research Seminar I
This is the first quarter of a two-quarter research seminar designed to give students experience in the production of a research paper, with a focus on designing theoretically-informed, empirically-tested projects. The seminar is taught in a workshop format focusing on the individual research projects of each student. While not a formal prerequisite, each student is expected to have at least the beginning of a research proposal idea before starting the course.
Comparative Politics and Policy of Energy (at Georgetown)
This seminar is an introduction to the politics and policy of oil, gas, and other fuels in an international context, with a particular focus on countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. Course topics include the fundamentals of oil and gas production and markets, the political and economic consequences of petroleum wealth (commonly referred to as the "resource curse"), resource nationalism and OPEC, and energy-related corruption.
Regression Methods for Policy Analysis (at Georgetown)
This class is the second course in a three-course quantitative methods sequence, with a focus on OLS multivariate regression and non-linear models with binary outcomes. Topics include research design, hypothesis testing, omitted variable bias, measurement error, missing data, diagnostics and issues related to model specification.