Welcome! I am a political scientist studying international order, sovereignty, and grand strategy. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. I received my Ph.D. from Princeton’s Department of Politics in 2025.

My book project examines internationalized territories as a distinct form of political authority, drawing on 23 cases of international rule since 1815. A paper drawn from this project asks why some contested territories are internationalized while others are not, utilizing a comparative case study of the internationalization of Vienna’s city center in 1945, the partition of Berlin, and Khrushchev's 1960 proposal to internationalize Berlin. In related work, I develop a decisionist account of “private sovereignty,” pushing back against the functionalist conception of sovereignty prevalent in the discipline.

A second strand of my research examines the history of ideas in American grand strategy. I am currently writing an intellectual history of neoconservatism, focusing on conservative intellectual James Burnham's influence on American foreign policy. I am also interested more broadly in continuities between Cold War strategy and 21st-century policy, as well as alternative and post-liberal theories of international order.

At Princeton, I taught undergraduate courses on international relations theory and grand strategy. I received Princeton’s George Kateb Teaching Award in 2024, given by the Politics Department each year to exceptional graduate student instructors. I was also the instructor of record for two sections of the graduate course “Inside the Situation Room” at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, led by Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Beyond the academy, I lecture regularly at the U.S. Department of State and often write for public audiences on history and foreign policy.

My c.v. can be viewed here. Contact me at penatzer@princeton.edu.