Teaching

Welcome to my teaching page! In recent years I have taught classes on civil and international conflict, African politics, climate change, international relations theory, foreign policy, international organizations, the politics of development, and political methodology. Information about these courses including syllabi are available from the links below.

Teaching philosophy (pdf)

Current/recent classes

From July to November 2021 I taught Conflict and Change in sub-Saharan Africa, a third-year undergraduate workshop. This is the second time I have taught this class. Due to ongoing travel restrictions due to Covid-19, I use a flipped classroom approach where most lectures are recorded for viewing before the workshop. This will free the workshop time for discussion and workshop activities.

During the first half of 2021 I taught a small honours seminar, Civilian Protection in Conflict and Post-Conflict Zones for the first time.

In 2020, I taught Environment, Human Security, and Conflict as a hybrid class. I posted all my videos as weekly playlists on the course page along with my lecture slides, outlines, and workshop activities. I received a 2020 Dean’s Commendation for Teaching Excellence award for my work for this class.

Resources

Over the years I have created a number of resources for my students and tutors including guides for writing literature reviews and research proposals. I have collected a number of these resources on my teaching resources page.

I have also uploaded all my slides from my 2012 graduate maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) class on the class page. They start with the intuition behind and assumptions underlying each type of model before giving hands-on examples in Stata. I found this approach very useful when I was learning these models, and I hope others find them useful as well. Please forgive the rather dated formatting of these slides!

Finally, for an introductory course on international relations I used to teach I developed a semester-long simulation centered on the ongoing Syrian conflict. In 2017 I won a college teaching award for the simulation design, and I published an article with Dr. Jessica Genauer describing it in more detail. This article outlines the costs and benefits of simulation design options towards encouraging students’ understanding of international relations concepts, and it proposes a course plan for tightly integrating lectures, readings, assessment, and simulation, regardless of class size or length. You can find the paper at the journal here. If your institution does not subscript to PS, do let me know.