I am a US and global historian, specializing in the history of international organizations, infrastructure, US foreign relations, and ideas.

As a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, I am completing a dissertation, entitled “Headquartering the World: American Power and the Space of Global Governance, 1945-1980.” It asks how US hegemony has transformed both the international system and the United States. Focusing on the United Nations headquarters, my dissertation examines the consequences of locating the center of world government on US soil after the Second World War. I show how the location of the UN headquarters has entangled the United States and the world in ways that have both benefitted and troubled Washington.

I have been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Scholarship, the Mackenzie King Traveling Fellowship, and the Truman Library Dissertation Year Fellowship.

Public History

• “Ambassadors to the Public: 70 Years of Guided Tours of the UN Headquarters” (UN Visitor Lobby, UN headquarters in New York, November 2022, and online)
• New Books in History podcast channel, the New Books Network
  • I conduct long-form interviews with scholars about their research. My 45 episodes have been downloaded a total of 250,000 times. Some of my guests include Quinn Slobodian, Heidi Tworek, Kiran Klaus Patel, Or Rosenboim, Christopher Dietrich, and Sam Moyn.

Select Publications

• “How American Culture Ate the World,” New Republic (2022).
• “Geopolitics Turned Inwards: The Princeton Military Studies Group and the National Security Imagination,” Diplomatic History 43:4 (2019).
• “The Strange Career of ‘National Security’,” The Atlantic (2019).
• “The Department of Everything Else,” Los Angeles Review of Books.