Graduate Student

My research interests include public opinion on foreign policy, leader reputation at home and abroad, and signaling and crisis behavior. My current research examines the role of the leader in support for military interventions, focusing in particular on how leaders build and erode their credibility with the public.

Dissertation

Self-Governance as Self-Cultivation: Zhu Xi and Confucian Democracy

Committee

Stephen K. White (chair), Lawrie Balfour, Murad Idris, Charles Mathewes (Religious Studies), Anne Kinney (East Asia), and Cong Ellen Zhang (History)

I graduated in political science at the University of Bologna in 2013. At the University of Bologna my studies focused mostly on Italian electoral politics at the regional level. Over time, my main interests have shifted towards international relations. I received a MA in International Relations from the University of Bologna in 2016 and a MA in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics in 2017. I am particularly interested in the political economy of money and trade.

My research centers on American politics, with emphases in political psychology, racial and ethnic politics, and political behavior. I am especially interested in how emotion influences our thinking and behavior regarding politics. I am similarly interested in the role that group-based social identities play in determining political preferences and consequent behavior. For information regarding my current projects, please visit my personal website.

My research focuses on the intersection of civil war intervention and great powers’ foreign strategies, I aim to further develop a framework to reevaluate the U.N. and great powers’ intervention in civil wars, explaining why international intervention sometimes sent unclear signals and deteriorated the situations.