I am a scholar of international relations working at the intersection of political thought, history, and international law. I am currently active across multiple interconnected areas of research. One project, funded by a major grant (€250k) from the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO), revolves around the issue of when and why the right to wage war became the exclusive legal prerogative of sovereign states.

More broadly, I am interested in the regulation of warfare and its relationship to different visions of international order. I have a related abiding interest in narratives and myths about the making of the modern international system, and the political alternatives these narratives have obscured.

From 2017 to 2023 I was a tenured Assistant Professor of International Relations at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, with a one-year interlude spent at Princeton University as a Fung Global Fellow (2019-2020).

My first book, War, States, and International Order: Alberico Gentili and the Foundational Myth of the Laws of War was published in the Cambridge Studies in International Relations (Cambridge UP) in 2022. It received the 2023 Francesco Guicciardini Prize from the International Studies Association as the best book in Historical International Relations for that year.

Before turning in a historical direction, I worked on transitional justice and international criminal law. I was the Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Transitional Justice Research, I served as a legal officer on a defense team before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2013-2014, and I worked on the Hissène Habré case during my time at Human Rights Watch in 2010-2011. This practical involvement in contemporary international justice cases pertaining to post-conflict situations significantly motivated my turn to history. I felt it impossible to understand the circumstances of these conflicts, as well as the form that the international law took in regulating both their unfolding and their aftermath, without looking to the past.

This orientation also structures my approach to teaching. I try to show students how valuable it is to turn to the past to understand contemporary international relations. My teaching was awarded Leiden University’s Casimir Prize, a distinction given annually to the best lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences. I was then a finalist for the EU-wide Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences and Humanities, elected to Leiden University’s Teachers’ Academy, and given €25k to develop a project entitled “Overcoming Polarization: A Program of Research-Based, Inclusive Teaching Methods for a Global University.”

Prior to my time at Leiden, I studied at Brown University (2010) and at the University of Oxford, from which I received an MPhil (2013) and DPhil (2018). My doctoral work won various awards, including Oxford University’s Winchester Thesis Prize, awarded annually to an outstanding thesis on international relations with particular reference to the area of human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Outside of my academic research I have a longstanding interest in movement practices (dance, yoga, gymnastics) and chess, for which I won the French national championship for my age group as a child.