RESEARCH
Broadly, my research is animated by two major themes. First, I examine the relationship between foreign policy and national identity, primarily through critical approaches that emphasize the role of language, representation and gendered discourses to explore foreign policy practices. This involves thinking about international security and threats as articulated, contested, and interpreted, which I argue opens up new avenues to investigate world politics. Second, I leverage these approaches to investigate challenges within the current international order through the lens of America's closest allies. How do American allies navigate the growing tremors within the U.S.-led international order that is increasingly challenged? What unique insights are gleaned on American foreign policy by de-centering the U.S. to consult the challenges facing countries like Canada as they adapt to an increasingly multiplex order?
From 2021-2022, I was the inaugural post-doctoral fellow at the Taube Centre for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences within the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the historic Jagiellonian University in Kraków. The Centre brings together interdisciplinary scholars of identity and politics from around the world and during that year I researched and produced the majority of the manuscript that would become my recent monograph.
My main focus has been on American allies' foreign policy engagements in the 21st century. My new book, Identity Discourses and Canadian Foreign Policy in the War on Terror (Palgrave 2023), takes a retrospective look at Canada's most significant foreign policy decisions over the past two decades - to join the Afghanistan War in 2001 and abstain from the Iraq War in 2003 - in evaluating the future of Canadian foreign policy and Canada-U.S. relations in the current era of international turmoil.
Currently, as a Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at the School of International Service at American University, I am conducting research and teaching in the Department of Global Security and Foreign Policy. As a lead project, I am crafting an article on the rise of feminist-oriented foreign policies, especially among NATO countries, and the challenges to these policies in light of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I am also interested in interpretive methodologies in Political Science research and the function of national myths, tropes, and "common sense" assumptions at the level of foreign policy. I have presented my research at various international conferences including those of the International Studies Association (ISA), American Political Science Association (APSA), Association for Canadian Studies in the United States (ACSUS), and the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR).