In a past life, I spent half a decade traveling around Europe and Central Asia as an itinerant teacher of English, working and living in Prague, Katowice (Poland), Madrid, Baku (Azerbaijan) among less glorious places, like England’s West Midlands. When I returned to graduate school at the end of my journeys, two things came back to the US with me: my wife Carole — a fellow teacher and dislocated Welshwoman — and an enduring love of teaching.

I continued to teach during my MA and PhD studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where I ran the European Studies program’s weekly discussion of European news and TA’d a dozen sections of Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and International Trade Theory. In 2011-12 and then again in 2012-13, students named me “Best Economics Teaching Assistant of the Year.”

As I closed on the end of my dissertation, I was hired as a Professorial Lecturer by SAIS and then American University’s School of International Service (SIS), where I worked from 2013-2015. I taught the SIS introductory undergraduate courses on International Political Economy and Contemporary Europe as well as the graduate International Political Economy and International Economics courses. I periodically return to SAIS to teach their graduate survey course on Comparative Politics as well as Intermediate Microeconomics.

After teaching at both SAIS and SIS, I made the move to the Netherlands to take on an Assistant Professor position at the University of Groningen, an international university town near the Dutch-German border close to the North Sea. This year (2019-20), I will be teaching the International Political Economy of Global Financial Integration to MA students as well as the International Political Economy of Monetary Relations to undergraduates. I am also now the overall coordinator of the BA program of 750 students – as well as a member of the governing board of CLIO, the student group in the International Relations and International Organization (IRIO) department.

For non-students, a bit of my commitment to objective-based learning built on interactive lectures and a mix of classroom activities can be gleaned from my syllabi posted on this website (link above). For prospective students, I encourage you to give one of my classes a spin. It’s educational and can be a lot of fun — take it from some past students!