My research focuses on political theory and the temporal conditions that shape democratic life. I study how institutions pace political action, how they accelerate or delay change, and how these temporal structures shape what people can hope, imagine, or attempt. My recent work examines the temporal dimensions of political imagination in Hobbes in “Paradoxes of Possibility” in Philosophy and Social Criticism. I also explore how economic and political systems generate forms of temporal crisis, most recently in my article on Adam Smith and the subprime mortgage collapse in New Political Science. Earlier research on the politics of presence and modernity appears in my chapter “The Difficulty of Being Present” in Adventures in Modernism, the edited volume I assembled on the work of Marshall Berman.

I also write about pedagogy, especially questions of ungrading and assessment, and I am increasingly curious about how AI is altering students’ temporal experience of learning. This is not yet a formal research program, but it reflects my broader interest in how institutions structure judgment, agency, and attention in the classroom.

Across these areas, I return to a central question: how do the temporal frameworks that organize our political and educational institutions shape the kinds of democratic life we are able to build?