I'm a historian of political thought and political theorist. I work on 18-20th c. debates about democracy, public opinion, and liberalism, and how they shed light on current discussions about politics.
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My first monograph, The People's Two Powers: Public Opinion and Popular Sovereignty from Rousseau to Liberal Democracy, is forthcoming with CUP ("Ideas in Context"). It revisits how the idea of democracy emerged during the French Revolution, and how French liberalism took shape in response to that emergence, eventually leading to the invention of the term "liberal democracy."
I'm currently working on two projects. The first is a normative theory of elite accountability, drawing on Rousseau’s defense of recall and the imperative mandate. The second is a history of the shifting relationship between propaganda and democracy, from the late 19th c. to the 1960s, in Europe, Russia, and the U.S.
My other research interests include the connections between democracy and empire, the impact of technological change on ideas of political participation, and the invention of traditions. In 2024, I joined the Centre de Théorie Politique at the Université Libre de Bruxelles as an FNRS chargé de recherches. Previously, I held a British Academy fellowship at King's College London, taught at Brown and Yale, and earned my PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019.