I am Scholar in Residence at the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC, and an expert on American far-right illiberal intellectualism.

I’m interested in political culture and how thinking shapes our lives. My research has been published in the Journal of Politics, The Review of Politics, and Polity, and I have also written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Bulwark, The New Republic, and Politico.

My book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is out now with Princeton University Press. It is about the surprising intellectual movement behind Trumpism.

It has been widely reviewed, including in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, Reason, Commonweal, The Observer, Jacobin, The UnPopulist, Project Syndicate, Splice Today, Washington Monthly, Literary Review, Quillette, The Dispatch, Law & Liberty, The University Bookman, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, Naked Capitalism, The Giving Review, Perspectives on Political Science,  Cass Sunstein’s Substack, Rod Dreher’s Substack; Publishers Weekly (Starred Review), and Foreword (Starred Review).

There has also been international coverage in Der Spiegel, Die Furche , Die Presse, and Die Zeit (Germany/Austria), L’Express, Le Monde and Revue Francaise de Science Politique (France), Weekendavisen and Informacion (Denmark), Haaretz (Israel), Chosun (South Korea), Nueva Sociedad (Latin America), and the Oxford Political Review.

Furious Minds was a Financial Times Best Book of the Year for 2025, and won the Best Book Award for the American Political Thought Section of the American Political Science Association.

I have a BA and MA from the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, and a PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin (political theory and public law).

I’ve held faculty positions at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, and Georgetown and American Universities in DC, and am currently a Scholar in Residence at American University, a Senior Advisor for the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University, and a nonresident fellow with the Brookings Institution.

I live in DC with my husband and our two sweet, energetic, and mischievous young boys.