I will be in Orange County, CA and Seattle, WA the last week of May and first week of June conducting field work for my dissertation. Should be fun “practicing history without a license” as my co-chair is fond of saying. But in truth, I think good empirical research on foreign policy needs archival work now more than ever. I can only show so much with a formal model or regression; as important as those are to rigorous social science, getting into the historical weeds is equally as essential because it shows us which of the variables we thought were important actually are. No telling what I’ll find or if my essential claims will need revision.