“Rawls contrasts ‘a mere modus vivendi’ with the principled basis of his own pluralism, and he takes it to cover, not only a Hobbesian standoff of equal fear, but also equilibria based on perceptions of mutual advantage … the very phrase ‘a mere modus vivendi’ suggests a certain distance from the political; experience (including at the present time) suggests that those who enjoy such a thing are already lucky,”
Bernard Williams, In the Beginning was the Deed
Since September 2020, I have been a postdoctoral research fellow affiliated with the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) at Stanford University. I work on a multi-disciplinary team led by Dan Jurafsky and Lanier Anderson; our team spans computer science, the humanities, and the social sciences and shares a common goal of investigating conceptual change over time. Our group formed in September 2020 as one of the inaugural recipients of the Hoffman-Yee Research Grant, which sponsors interdisciplinary AI research; in September 2021, we successfully competed for continuation funding of our project. In addition to my role as a postdoctoral researcher, I also served as the project coordinator for our group between September 2020 and October 2021.
>> Video: Our group presenting at the 2021 Hoffman-Yee Symposium (begin at 42.00)
>> Blog: The linked post provides a brief overview of my research to date.
Prior to this, I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford in September 2020, graduating with a focus in political theory as well as a certificate in computational social science. Broadly, my dissertation research investigates the individual motivations and social conditions for political cooperation, with a particular focus on developing a conceptual framework to theorize about norms of political legitimacy, authority, and stability. My work synthesizes methods and insights across a range of disciplines, addressing questions in normative political theory and intellectual history by drawing on computational methods of text analysis, as well as findings from formal theory and empirical political science.
>> Article (open access): the first chapter of my dissertation appeared in American Political Science Review in August 2021. The paper investigates private rationality as a motivation for democratic cooperation and, in doing so, critiques Rawls’s characterization of rationality.
I was a Stanford Humanities Center Dissertation Prize Fellow for the 2019-20 academic year. I also held a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship between 2016-2019. I received my B.A. with Honors in History from Stanford University in 2011, and was awarded the James Birdsall Weter Prize for Outstanding History Honors Thesis.