I am a political theorist who uses the history of political and economic thought and contemporary democratic theory to consider how we can strengthen liberal democracy in our era of major technological transformation.

I am a Senior Fellow at the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where I host Virtual Sentiments, a podcast featuring interviews with scholars and practitioners reflecting on the ethics and politics of technology with an eye to the past. I am also a Community Fellow at the AI and Democratic Citizenship Initiative at Georgetown University for the 2026-2027 academic year.

My first book, Spectatorship and Surveillance in Liberal Democracies: Seeing and Being Seen, under contract with Oxford University Press,  reinterprets the arguments of key figures in the liberal tradition, such as Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, to criticize how inequality and surveillance undermine personal autonomy and democracy today. In a world of citizen-spectators, the problem is not so much that we like to watch but that we cannot avoid being watched ourselves—by each other, by state agencies, and by private companies alike. 

My research been published in the American Journal of Political Science,  Political Theory, and the Political Science Reviewer. You can find my public writing on my Substack newsletter, Theory of Virtual Sentiments.

I earned my PhD from Georgetown University's Department of Government in 2019. I also have a BA in International Relations from Tufts University, with minors in Film Studies and Russian Language. I’m an avid photographer (a few of my photos decorate this site), and my family and friends like to joke my brain runs on Simpsons OS.