​My research centers on the history of the modern human sciences, with a particular emphasis on the history of economic, psychological, and anthropological thought. My dissertation, tentatively titled Economy of Desire: Sciences of Want, 1870-1970, is a comparative history of scientific ideas about human want and motivation across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In it, I argue that the secularization of the human sciences, and the decline of introspective methods for investigation of mental states and feelings, produced parallel behavioristic turns across much of the emerging disciplines, with profound impacts on political and economic life – and our understanding of ourselves to this day.

I received a B.A. in History from Oxford University in 2012, and an M.A. in International History from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland in 2014. You can download my CV here.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

“Maps of Desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants,” History of the Human Sciences, under review. (Winner of the journal's Early Career Prize.)

Cognitive map illustrated in Tolman (1949)