Biography

I am a political theorist, interested in the ways in which political institutions, socio-economic conditions and public culture constrain the justification and implementation of normative political theories in practice.  The three main themes that shape my research are (i) the role of civic motivation in political theory, and especially in normative theories of international justice; (ii) national identity and civic republican citizenship; and (iii) the structure of dilemmas in international politics.
In my PhD thesis, titled ‘Motivating Cosmopolitanism: a Political Critique’ (University College London, 2015), I developed a novel argument about the role of motivational constraints in liberal cosmopolitan theory. Rather than focusing on individual psychological and ethical considerations, as is usually the case in the literature, my thesis focused on the distinctly political role of civic motivation. I argued that liberal cosmopolitan theories lack a convincing account of the motivational preconditions required for stable political institutions, and that the most compelling account for this civic motivation is not wholly compatible with cosmopolitan theory.
Building on the framework developed in my doctoral work, and applying it to a new area of research my project as a Max Weber Fellow looks at dual nationality and the challenges it poses for civic republican conceptions of citizenship. Unlike familiar accounts of the problem, which focus on the supposed psychological and motivational constraints of dual nationals themselves, the alternative account I aim to develop construes the challenge of dual nationality as a distinctively political challenge.
In 2014-2016 I was a teaching associate at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, supervising the ‘Ethics and World Politics’ module and convening the doctoral methods workshop in political theory (Political Theory and the Real World). I also taught as a teaching assistant at UCL’s MA programme in human rights and at the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London (The Political Theory of Capitalism).