Welcome to my website! I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Illinois. My research interests lie principally in political psychology, especially in the role of social identities and how that affects our political beliefs and behaviour. There are two social identities in particular that I focus on: regional and religious identities. My dissertation focuses on the role of elites in shaping the social geography of our world, including our regional identities.

A: A Summary of Historical Evidence of Region Creation and Change This is a summary of changes discussed more fully in my forthcoming dissertation. They are presented in (roughly) chronological order. Example Citation The ancient Greeks divide the world into the regions of Asia, Europe, and Africa and think of the inhabitants of each region as having specific characteristics that make them more or less fit to rule. For example, Greek writers and politicians on the mainland of modern-day Greece derided the “Oriental” or Asian Greeks as weak and decadent when compared to the “European” Greeks, who were lauded for their love of freedom.

I recently finished a pair of books: The French: Portrait of a People by De Gramont and Barbarian Migration and the Roman West by Halsall. Both were interesting in their own right, but I found them even more fascinating from the standpoint of historiography. Both books were good reminders that history is not the dispassionate, factual, or objective enterprise that the general public mostly seems to regard it as. All history is subjective and reflects the worldviews, objectives, and morals of the historian (and the society in which the historian lives).

When Senator Mike Lee compared Donald Trump to Captain Moroni in 2020 it caused a storm of controversy. At the time, I found the comparison ludicrous, but subsequent actions by President Trump have made reading Alma 60 (the Book of Mormon chapter that contains an epistle of Captain Moroni to Chief Judge Pahoran) more interesting, and now the comparison seems rather apt.1 In that epistle, Captain Moroni accuses Pahoran and his fellow judges of either being incompetent (sitting “upon your thrones in a state of thoughtless stupor” (v.

Each year I rate each book according to my assessment of its quality and my level of enjoyment. The three best books I read in a year are the ones that have the highest combined rating of quality and enjoyment. This year, these three were as follows: A House for Mr. Biswas A House for Mr. Biswas essentially revisits the plot of his first novel, Mystic Masseur. By the time he writes A House for Mr.