Teaching and Supervision
I am an experienced and enthusiastic teacher with extensive experience teaching and designing courses at all levels of the university from undergraduate to practitioner level. I am an active PhD supervisor to three excellent emerging scholars.
Undergraduate and Masters Teaching
I have taught widely on political institutions, public policy, comparative politics and research methods at the Australian National University:
Policy Research (convened S2 2024, nominated for a CAP Teaching Award)
This course provides students with important skills for interpreting and using policy research. Students will be introduced to the process and methods of empirical policy research. The course begins with an introduction to the research process before moving on to discuss aspects of concept formation and operationalization. Students will explore the craft of formulating research questions and generating hypotheses, discuss aspects of causal inference and consider various research methods including qualitative, quantitative, experimental, observational and mixed methods approaches.
Australian Politics (convened S2 2023, nominated for a Dean’s Commendation)
Australia is one of the world’s oldest liberal democracies. This course explores this stability and change dynamic through an examination of two key themes: (1) the values, attitudes and behaviour of citizens, policymakers and other important actors; and (2) the cleavages and institutions that attempt to manage them.
Quantitative Methods in Political Science and International Relations (convened S2 2020, nominated for a Dean’s Commendation)
Quantitative Methods in Political Science and International Relations provides students with a continuation of the principles of social science research design and empirical analysis that they were exposed to in their first-year courses. The course begins with a review of the role of research design, method, and methodology in the social sciences that draws on examples from both qualitative and quantitative political science and international relations.
Comparative European Politics (convened S1 2020)
European countries are among the most developed and democratic around the world. However, while they continue setting precedents in terms of democratic developments - for example with the creation of the European Union - many countries in the region face major domestic and international challenges. This course provides analytical and evidence-based knowledge to understand European politics from a comparative perspective.
Uniting Europe: history, politics, theory (convened S1 2020)
The European Union is the most advanced supranational polity on the planet, but how did it get that way? Was it the Grand Design of far-sighted visionaries, or merely an unintended consequence of past decisions and policies? This course poses such questions and introduces students to the history and theory of European integration. By examining the political history of the European Union, students will discover the theories used to explain the unique degree of political integration that has characterised the European state system since the end of World War Two.
Short Courses
Foundations of Statistical Analysis
This course is a gentle guide for Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students and practitioners to statistical analysis in the social and political sciences. Using accessible and politically relevant data, we explore the fundamentals of causation, bivariate and multivariate analysis, along with a hands-on crash course in the statistical programming language R.
Navigating Parliamentary Decisionmaking
This course is intended for public servants working in or closely with parliamentarians and other political actors. As a contributor to this course, I lectured on legislative party organisation and the careers of ministers. We had productive class discussion facilitated by the course convener, the Hon. Tony Smith, and special practitioner guests including former cabinet minister Marise Payne and the former Speaker of the House of Representatives Anna Burke.
Program design
From 2021-23 I was the first director of the ANU’s online Summer School in Political Analysis. This program was conceived during the Pandemic when PhD students and practitioners were not permitted to travel to large in person methods schools. As its director, I organised and set the curriculum, the marketing, finance, and also taught a popular course on foundations of statistics. In its first iteration, we taught over 100 students from around the Asia- Pacific region (and even a couple from Latin America). This program was a privilege to be a part of, and I have learned a lot about short course and executive educational design as a result.
Supervision
Mr Pratyush Sarma (chair; party organisation)
Pratyush’s work explores political campaigning in India. Current understanding has focused on demand-driven approaches to explain political campaigns, as well as party professionalisation to explain success, particularly for the BJP. Using a mixed methods approach in both national and constituency level campaigns, his thesis is demonstrating the importance of modes of party organisation in determining parties’ adaptation to campaign conditions and their strategic choices. Pratyush also has an interest in international relations, having written a paper on cricket diplomacy, which enabled him to become a practitioner as a delegate to Cricket Australia’s diplomatic event in Perth ahead of the first Australia v India test match in 2024.
Ms Eve Cheng (associate; topology and networks science)
Eve’s thesis investigates the application of topological data analysis to the field of statistical physics, more specifically the SSH models, and social networks based on the career backgrounds of members of the Parliament from 1947-2019 Her work bridges emerging advances in pure mathematics with social sciences and the humanities, and was awarded the B H Neumann Prize for the most outstanding talk presented by a student at the Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Ms Amalina Mohd (associate; judicial politics)
Amalina is focused on the construction (and de-construction) of judicial legitimacy in Malaysia, prompted by recent developments in which 13 politicians found themselves facing corruption charges, raising serious concerns over the independence of the judiciary. Judicial legitimacy has been a long term struggle for Malaysian democracy, and Amalina’s thesis explores the slow process of rebuilding the trust of government, civil society and the general public.