He has held previous positions at the Princeton Society of Fellows and the University of Michigan, and is the author of a book on Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (winner of the 2014 Harry Levin Prize for Best First Book, American Comparative Literature Association/ACLA), which examines the role of ressentiment and revenge in European anticolonial thought of the Enlightenment.