I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Florida State University. Before joining FSU, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University’s Department of Politics and the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and the Managing Editor of Security Studies. I earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from The Ohio State University and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Brasília.
Before entering academia, I worked as a career diplomat in Brazil. In this position, I experienced firsthand the search for international status: like other emerging powers, Brazil then strove to be recognized as an equal by the great powers. But while a growing scholarly consensus indicates that the search for status motivates foreign policy and may even cause wars, we still understand little about how countries achieve status or how status motivates political behavior. My research engages these crucial debates by drawing from an interdisciplinary body of work.