I write for general and academic audiences, with special expertise in politics, public policy, race, religion, and memoir.
General Audience: I write freelance articles on politics, public policy, and religion for Zócalo Public Square, a non-profit web magazine devoted to community building. You can find all my articles here. Highlights include:
- Politics: A Mama Grizzly’s Natural Habitat, A Tale of Two Goldwaters, and Not Foreigners, Followers
- Public Policy: The Undergraduate Education that Drags On and On and On and Supreme Misunderstanding
- Religion: Not as White As You Think and Clash of Mormons
I recently established a new multi-author politics blog, Town Square Politics, with the aim of bringing diverse perspectives together in respectful debate. You can read my posts on that site here. I also write on the Commentary section of this site and occasionally on my own political blog, Passion of a Moderate. I am a guest blogger on LDS topics at Rational Faiths.
Academic Audience: I hold a Ph.D. in U.S. Political History from the University of California. As part of that training I produced the following:
- Dissertation: Phoenix Rising: Arizona and the Origins of Modern Conservative Politics – Traces the ideological and institutional development of the Arizona Republican Party from the late-1940s through the late-1980s. Includes analysis of how Phoenix city government contributed to a shift in state politics, which in turn reshaped national politics, especially through the actions of Barry Goldwater at each step in this process.
- Undergraduate Thesis: One Du Bois, Indivisible: Connections between Autobiography and History in the Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois – Close reading of Du Bois’s major historical, autobiographical, and fictional works to chart his evolving ideas about race, history, and the role of the individual in mass phenomena.