My research centers on the microsociological study of international relations. Everyday practices, face-to-face interactions, emotions, and embodied experiences are the small units of analysis that take centerstage in my research. Long considered irrelevant in a field dominated by grand and structural theories, my work is part of a growing body of scholarship that shows how small units have a distinct form (morphology) and enjoy a puzzling degree of autonomy from wider structural constraints, making them consequential in world politics.

While I have an abiding interest in the wonders of the ‘micro,’ I wrestle with my structural and historical instincts. This informs my interest in asking how micro-level units are tethered to wider structures of class, race, and gender. In making these connections I draw a great deal of inspiration from structural approaches like historical sociology and Bourdieusian political sociology.

Empirically, I pursue my interest in the micro by studying diplomats and international bureaucrats. Most of my fieldwork has been in the circuitries of everyday diplomacy spanning ministries and diplomatic enclaves in Southeast Asia, especially in the budding ASEAN diplomatic field in Jakarta, Indonesia. I use interpretive approaches and methods in my research, mainly elite interviews and ethnography (when possible), supported by historical print-media analysis.

Besides my research, I love literary fiction (especially postcolonial fiction in South and Southeast Asia), sci-fi films, and nearly anything by the virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz.