I arrived at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI as an Assistant Professor in 2017 and was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 2024. I teach the history of political philosophy, and my research focuses on ancient Greek political thought. I received my PhD in 2015 from the University of Texas at Austin, having written my dissertation on the theme of political ambition in Plato’s portrayal of Alcibiades and his relationship to Socrates. That project became my first book, Socrates and Alcibiades: Plato’s Drama of Political Ambition and Philosophy, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2017.

My next book, Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life, was published by Cornell University Press in December of 2023. It includes an introduction addressing the state of scholarly debate concerning the authenticity of the Letters, a new English translation, and an interpretive essay. Following most ancient commentators and a handful of more recent ones, I take the entire Letters as a Platonic literary whole providing an account of Plato’s own political career—including the writing of his dialogues—and of the place of philosophy therein. My work on this book was supported by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Wayne State University Research Grant.

My current research seeks to rehabilitate the study of the political philosophy of Isocrates in the field of political theory. My planned book on that subject, Isocrates and the Socratics, will contain my own new translations of, and interpretive essays on, the Isocratic texts which most clearly refer to Plato and Socrates: Busiris, Encomium of Helen, Against the Sophists, and Antidosis. My intention is to show that the thought of Isocrates provides an overlooked and invaluable perspective on the meaning of Socratic and Platonic philosophy. My work on Isocrates has been supported by a Wayne State University Research Grant, by a fellowship and resident scholarship with the Wayne State University Humanities Center, and by a Marilyn Williamson Endowed Distinguished Faculty Fellowship, also from the Humanities Center at WSU. In January of 2026, I was awarded my second Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities, which will provide a year of research support for me to complete this project. I have presented my ongoing research on Isocrates at annual meetings of the American, Midwest, and Northeastern Political Science Associations, and as lecture in the Joe R. Long Chair in Democratic Studies Speaker Series at the University of Texas at Austin.

My teaching at Wayne State covers the whole history of political philosophy, from classical to contemporary. At the undergraduate level, I teach the following courses.

PS 2510, Introduction to Political Philosophy: What is Politics? (Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche)

PS 3530, Classical Political Philosophy: What is Justice? (Plato’s Republic)

PS 3550, American Political Philosophy: What is Freedom? (Federalist vs. Anti-Federalist debates, philosophy of religious toleration, Tocqueville, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin)

PS 3560, Modern Political Philosophy: What is a Republic? (Machiavelli, Montesquieu)

PS 4510, Classical Political Philosophy: What is War? (Thucydides)

At the graduate level, I alternate yearly between PS 7550, in which my students and I undertake a semester-long reading of a classical political philosopher (Plato’s Republic F17, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics W20, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War W22, Plato’s Gorgias W24, Aristotle’s Politis W26), and PS 7560, in which we study the intellectual-historical arc traced by Hobbes’s On the Citizen, Rousseau’s First and Second Discourses, and a selection of works by Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spake Zarathustra). In both graduate courses, students also learn about the contemporary study of the history of political philosophy by reading books and articles representative of a variety of approaches, perspectives, and schools of thought. In 2023, I received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching from Wayne State University.

My theory offerings at Wayne are supplemented by my weekly “Reading Group in the History of Philosophy,” in which my students and I engage in intensive studies of texts not covered in class as well as their contemporary interpreters. Since 2017, we have read works by Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Aristotle, Niccolo Machiavelli, Edmund Burke, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, and John Rawls.

Moreover, I have been fortunate enough to teach, in addition to my specialty in political theory, courses and workshops drawing on my secondary political science specialization in quantitative methodology. I have taught introductory graduate courses in statistical inference both at Michigan State University and at Wayne State, and have taught “Math Camp” workshops to incoming graduate students at UT (2011-15), MSU (2015-17), and WSU (2020-present). Since inheriting that program as a graduate student at UT Austin, I have expanded it to incorporate material for more advanced students, and currently offer it to a variety of students from other social science departments. In my undergraduate studies at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH, I double-majored in physics and political science. In another life, had I been unable to pursue my passion in the study of ancient Greek philosophy, I could have been very happy as a math or physics teacher; in this one, at least I get to teach Math Camp.

Before moving to the United States to pursue a life of study, I was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, a unique and amazing city from which I proudly hail (and to whose glorious hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens, I remain unwaveringly loyal). In my spare time, I enjoy chess, camping, cooking, comedy, playing music, etymologies, and, more than anything, playing with my sons.

Which brings me to my life’s blissful epicenter. In 2017, I married my wife, Cassie, and since then we have produced a pair of indescribably beautiful boys, Oskar and Solomon. Our happy family lives in Ferndale, MI.

Please find Curriculum Vitae, project abstracts, and other resources on the pages of this website. Feel free to email me to request any other materials or information.