I am a political scientist of education and an Assistant Professor of Public and Community Service Studies at Providence College, where I teach courses about democratic participation, civically-engaged research, and education policy, and I serve as a Civil Discourse Faculty Fellow at PC’s Dialogue, Inclusion, and Democracy Lab. I am also a researcher with the Civic Engagement Research Group.

As a teacher-scholar shaped by over a dozen years as an educator at the postsecondary and K-12 level, I engage with teaching and scholarship through praxis, or the iterative integration of theory, reflection, and action. My courses and research projects emerge through mutually beneficial collaborations with community partners, which support student learning, academic scholarship, and real-world problem solving.

I research the politics of civic education curriculum and policy as sites for political socialization and engagement in a pluralistic U.S. democracy. My book project examines how civics curriculum focusing on local and salient political content activates youth political engagement. New and ongoing projects include typologizing the political and moral stance of teachers as street-level bureaucrats, tracing the impact of civics curriculum on youth political outcomes, teacher neutrality in democratic classrooms, and developing a framework for social studies curriculum implementation policy.