Syllabus for PS 580 (PhD Seminar in International Relations)

Here's a draft of the Fall 2025 version of the PhD seminar in international relations.

It’s hard to know what goals to set for a class like PS 580. Complete coverage of “the field” isn’t just impractical—it’s incoherent. There’s simply too much IR out there, and much of it doesn’t speak to itself, let alone to the broader ambitions of theory-building.

So what should a graduate proseminar do?

The traditional answer is to cover the paradigms: realism, liberalism, constructivism, rationalism, empiricism, whatever-ism. That approach makes some sense—if you don’t teach the paradigms, your students won’t be able to communicate with colleagues who were trained in a paradigm-centric tradition. But there’s a danger in treating paradigms as checkpoints or required flags on a map. You risk teaching a taxonomy rather than a discipline. And the discipline, as I see it, is thinking about international relations deeply, rigorously, and humbly.

So what does that look like in syllabus form?

I tried to strike a middle ground. Many of the Usual Suspects make an appearance, but not in isolation, and not just as relics to be cited when dutifully invoking “the canon.” Instead, each reading appears in a broader conceptual and ontological context: not “Here’s what realism says,” but “Here’s one way to think about systems. Now let’s make it weird.”

The course starts with three metatheoretical problems: ontology, levels of analysis, and rationality. These are not abstract distractions—they’re the terrain beneath every IR argument, and students need a feel for that terrain before they can navigate the field with any confidence or creativity.

From there, we dig into two big clusters: (1) the state, and (2) the international system. Those aren't just convenient organizing buckets. They’re the field's two most persistent units of analysis, and both deserve to be problematized, not just presumed.

Throughout the syllabus, I’ve tried to blend IR classics with readings from history, philosophy, economics, and even mathematics. Yes, mathematics. In what’s probably the most heterodox week, Waltz’s Theory of International Politics is paired with Brendan Fong and David Spivak’s Seven Sketches in Compositionality, an intro text on applied category theory. That pairing is not a gimmick: both are trying, in very different ways, to talk about systems, levels, and emergent structure. IR has always struggled to think clearly about such things, and my hunch is that cross-training in other disciplines can sharpen the tools we use to do it.

There’s some feminist IR, some historical sociology, some empirical political economy. There’s also a lot of ontology—Amie Thomasson, E.J. Lowe, and Peter van Inwagen make appearances—and a recurring concern with what kinds of things we're even allowed to treat as real.

The Practical Stuff

I’ll be teaching remotely this semester, so I tried to choose readings that are easily accessible through UIUC’s library system and that don’t require too many hard-to-find volumes. The course is organized as a true seminar: students rotate roles as Advocates and Critics, with memos due before class and the expectation that the discussion will sometimes go “out of bounds” (on purpose). There’s also a take-home final that asks students to synthesize what they’ve read and wrestle with big-picture questions.