In Spring 2023, I taught a PhD course on political science research methods.
Course Description: This seminar introduces graduate students to critical issues and contemporary debates in the logic and design of empirical social science. The course aims to help you recognize and navigate some of the varied modes—quantitative, qualitative, and interpretive—of empirical research, and the at times contentious exchanges about them. By the end of this course, you should become both: 1) a more methodologically acute consumer of empirical social science, and 2) a more sophisticated potential producer of research—i.e. better able to clearly formulate a research question, develop a strategy to answer it, and explain your research choices and results to academic audiences with varied methodological orientations.
In Fall 2022, I designed an upper-level undergraduate course on "Emerging Technology, AI, and International Politics."
Course Description: Rapid developments in new technologies have the potential to transform the international landscape. At the same time, the international environment also shapes the development of new technologies. This course examines the interactions between emerging technologies and global politics. It first introduces students to broad debates about the effects of technology on politics. Then it surveys the intersection between technological change and various outcomes in international politics, including economic statecraft, the rise and fall of great powers, social movements, and war. Throughout the course, we focus on the global implications of artificial intelligence.
I taught "Politics of China's Innovation System" in the Fall of 2022, a writing-in-the-disciplines course that I designed to guide students in writing research papers that explain various aspects of China's innovation system.
Course Description: China has ambitions to become a “science and technology superpower.” Yet, China will face difficult decisions as it enhances its scientific and technological capabilities. For instance, reducing dependency on foreign suppliers of key technologies could hamper China’s technological rise, which has benefited from international linkages. This course will unpack the politics behind some of these trade-offs. We will examine how China’s scientific and technological capabilities are shaped by: geopolitical position, regime type, institutions for skill formation, and misperceptions in power assessments.
In Spring 2022, I taught "Foreign Policy Decision-Making in International Relations" at Stanford University. It is a required core course for the Master's in International Policy program.
Course Description: Foreign Policy Decision-Making in International Relations examines the factors that shape how actors develop and implement foreign policy in a comparative context. How do bureaucratic politics and interagency processes across different country contexts facilitate and constrain leaders' decisions? This course draws on scholarship from political science, psychology, history, sociology, and economics to analyze how choices made by individuals, small groups, or coalitions representing nation-states result in policies or strategies with international outcomes. Students will learn how to leverage various social science theories and methodologies to explore and assess how leaders across the world weigh different policy options when responding to international problems.