I was born in Kansas City (which is probably a lot more of a big city than you think) but my familial roots are in small-town Kansas. Nonetheless, since the age of 15, I did a fair amount of growing up in Madrid, Spain. I did most of my undergraduate studies at Emporia State University, a public, regional university in Kansas which is not all that different from Humboldt (save the location!), majoring in Spanish, French, and Philosophy and minoring in Geography. While there, I did every study abroad program possible, including a year at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. When I graduated from ESU, I went back to the Complutense for a Master of Legal Studies in International Law. A few years later, I started my PhD at in Political Science at the University of Delaware but ended up spending most of my time while enrolled at UD researching for my dissertation on the comparative politics of immigration in Spain and Portugal at the University of Lisbon, initially with a Fulbright fellowship (and then I stayed for a couple of more years).

Beyond my studies, over a decade ago I started working with a think tank, the Instituto Galego de Análise e Documentación Internacional, based in Vigo, Galicia (Spain), mostly providing commentary on U.S. politics and foreign policy. Between then and now, I have done some State Department-funded work promoting democracy in Paraguay, became the Assistant Editor of the UK-based International Journal of Iberian Studies, and have taught courses in international relations, comparative politics, religion and politics, international migration, intro to geography, and even Spanish, at several colleges and universities in now five states, in addition to teaching one semester in Turkey and in Portugal. In other words, I know well what it is to be a bit outside of my comfort zone in an academic setting and thus would like to think of myself as a pretty understanding and empathetic professor.