Last week I presented a best practices workshop on project management for my fellow graduate students. The purpose was to provide younger students in the program with ideas and concepts for managing projects “from idea to publication”. Preparing my presentation for the workshop afforded me the opportunity to reflect on the principles of productivity that I’ve learned over the years. Despite claims to the contrary, both from within and without, the academe is not unlike many other professions: it a profession fundamentally about knowledge work but with functionally infinite demands on otherwise scarce time and attention.

Farewell Squarespace

I’ve hosted my webpage on Squarespace since sometime in my second year at UT Austin. After several years on the platform, I have nothing but praise for the folks at Squarespace: their reputation for up-time, customer service, and all around technical bad-assery is well deserved. If you’re looking for a web-hosting/web-design company wherein you can build a beautiful looking site without knowing any HTML, CSS, or anything of that stuff—and I do mean it: without any—then you cannot go wrong with a Squarespace site. But for me, the time has come to say goodbye.

Took a while but I have a dissertation topic. Summary My dissertation investigates the rise of religious liberty in American grand strategy. I begin by noting the empirical oddity of America’s international religious freedom agenda vis-a-vis other global powers and argue that religious freedom has long been an integral component to American statecraft. Although religion has recently garnered renewed attention from international relations scholars, the subject remains under-theorized. My project seeks to help us understand more fully how American views of liberty have shaped the efforts to remake and rebuild international order.

Blindside—U.S. Foreign Policy My post is up at Real Clear Defense. Close watching required: this issue isn’t going to go away any time soon.

The destruction of Alderaan was not Justified Sony Bunch is wrong (this time).