Courses Taught
POLS 1101: Introduction to American Government
Lecture, University of Georgia, Department of Political Science, 2021
This course introduces the fundamentals of the American and Georgia governments. We will primarily discuss how actors and institutions operate within the norms and traditions of modern government at the local, state, and federal levels, as well as why these political norms and traditions exist. Especially as we enter the post-2020 Election period, the goal of this course is to reinforce that political discourse is, at its core, a good thing.
Download Syllabus Here (Updated Spring 2021)
POLS 3600: Criminal Justice Administration
Lecture, University of Georgia, Department of Political Science, 2021-2022
The course serves as an introduction to the major institutions, actors, and agencies responsible for the administration of criminal justice in the United States. We will primarily focus on the broad and discrete areas of the criminal justice system, including, but not limited to: criminal behavior and theory, police, arrest, bail, prosecution, plea bargaining, conviction, sentencing, correction, probation, and reentry. We will also spend a good deal of time focusing on current events and the broader legal implications of modern criminal justice.
Download Syllabus Here (Updated Fall 2022)
Other Prepped Courses
The Supreme Court
At the seat of America’s judicial hierarchy is the Supreme Court, whose decision-making on even the most trivial disputes can instigate substantial legal and political repercussions. Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the Court and its justices. Unfortunately, this interest appears to rarely come from positions of support. For an institution that has historically relied on obscurity from the public discourse, recent decisions and public behaviors by the justices have caused political turmoil. This begs a natural question, how did the judiciary become such an object for political scrutiny? This course provides a holistic view of the Supreme Court and its politics. Rather than strictly leveraging our analysis through caselaw, we will analyze the Supreme Court as an institution - from the politics of confirmation hearings to the theories underpinning judicial decision-making and their effect on public opinion
Download Syllabus Here (Updated Spring 2023)
Constitutional Law: Federal Powers
At the seat of America’s judicial hierarchy is the Supreme Court, whose decision-making on even the most trivial disputes can instigate substantial legal and political repercussions. This course will analyze the Court and its decision-making through the lenses of caselaw and American Political Development (APD). The cases we will analyze will concern the separation of powers, national and state regulatory powers, the federal system, and the role of the Courts in American government
Download Syllabus Here (Updated Spring 2023)
Text As Data in the Social Sciences
So much information in our political world is stored not in tidy datasets, but in non-traditional sources like text, video, and audio. Social media posts, party manifestos, judicial decisions, presidential debates, testimonials, Congressional floor speeches, etc… the practice of politics in its myriad forms ultimately comes to be recorded in words on a page. How do we take all this unstructured text, far too extensive for any one researcher to read, and convert it into useful information for scientific inquiry? This course attempts to answer these questions by exploring the cutting edge of text as data, with a focus on developing practical skills to retrieve, represent, and analyze political texts as usable data.