I am a historian of the United States in the world, the history of information, and the history of ideas in the twentieth century. My first book, Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media, was published by Columbia UP in 2019. It traces how the United States shaped media around the world after 1945 under the banner of the “free flow of information,” showing how the push for global media access acted as a vehicle for American power.

My current manuscript, "The Weapon of Words: Language Training in the American Century," focuses on U.S. investments in language education in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I'm broadly interested in the connections between power and paradigms, and how American social scientists sought to disseminate findings and methods outside U.S. borders in fields ranging from modernization theory to applied linguistics, with varying results.

My work has been supported by fellowships and grants in the United States, Europe, and Asia. During the 2024-25 academic year I am on leave through a fellowship from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (for "The Weapon of Words"). From April-July 2024, I was an invited resident fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University, as part of the group project "Understanding the Transformations of World Politics: Ordering Principles and Infrastructures of Communication."

Before coming to St Andrews I was associate professor of history at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. I received my PhD from Yale University in 2014.