Teaching Portfolio
PS 231: Strategic Models
PS 231 is an undergraduate introduction to game theory and its applications in political science. The course runs on a flipped classroom design: content is delivered through a series of 14 asynchronous lecture videos; all synchronous class time is reserved for problem set Q&A and worked examples. Students arrive having watched the lecture. The hour together is for doing, not listening.
Lecture series
The 14 lectures are produced in 4K — face-cam with After Effects animations overlaid on the speaker, an original soundtrack, and a Premiere Pro edit that structures each video into three segments. Each runs 75–90 minutes. The production choices were deliberate: game theory has a reputation for being dry, and the goal was to make the lectures engaging enough that students would actually watch them and arrive at class ready to work.
Problem sets
The course has 14 problem sets, one per lecture. Rather than posing game-theoretic problems in the abstract, every problem set is set in an original fictional world — Geneseo, a continent with its own states, political factions, history, and geography — that develops over the arc of the course. Each problem set introduces a new episode in Geneseo’s politics and asks students to apply the tools from the corresponding lecture to understand it. The narrating voice is Socrates.
The world-building is pedagogically intentional. Students engage more carefully with a problem when its stakes feel coherent, and a persistent setting accumulates enough shared context that later problem sets can introduce genuine strategic complexity without losing the thread.
PS 398: Strategic International Relations
PS 398 is an upper-division seminar on formal models in international relations. The structure differs from PS 231: three long problem sets rather than 14 short ones, set in the same Geneseo world but developed more slowly, interleaved with readings from the IR literature. A shorter video series delivers the formal content asynchronously; synchronous sessions are split between problem-solving and structured paper discussion.
Syllabus · Sample problem set · Notes
PhD instruction
Doctoral advising and methods instruction at UIUC and FSU in formal theory and quantitative methods, primarily in one-on-one and small-group settings. Traditional in format.