undefinedundefinedJosh says, "I'm a pretty firm believer that being an intellectual omnivore is really important. There’s value in learning and thinking about other topics that sometimes go way beyond the things that you're familiar with… I think the main reason to do the Morgenstern Fellowship is not for any material benefits but just for the joy and the fun of engaging potentially new and interesting ideas." 

A member of the Oskar Morgenstern Fellowship’s inaugural cohort, Josh participated during the 2018-2019 academic year while obtaining his PhD in political science from Texas A&M University. As an Oskar Morgenstern Fellow, he not only encountered new ideas but also built on his existing understanding of political economy. Although he was “always interested in history, politics, [and] economics,” he first encountered political economy as its own field while majoring in international affairs and political science at Gettysburg College. There, he took a class taught by his undergraduate advisor on the political economy of security. When he realized that the field was “a mishmash of politics and economics… [that] you can use to study and understand international security,” he was hooked: “I went into graduate school knowing I wanted to [study] political economy of security.”

I'm a pretty firm believer that being an intellectual omnivore is really important.

In graduate school, Josh’s research revolved around international alliances. His dissertation focused on the effect of international alliances on military spending, including diving into the “competing empirical arguments and evidence” on the topic.

The Oskar Morgenstern Fellowship allowed him to pursue an extension of his dissertation research. As part of the program, the Oskar Morgenstern Fellows produce a proposal for quantitative research that engages their own research interests and the ideas of Austrian, Virginia, and Bloomington schools of political economy. This is one of the fellowship’s distinguishing features, Josh says: “Most fellowships that I'm aware of, you do your research or you do some sort of research that's very focused on what they want, and then you go there. Here, it's much more, we're going to have you read a bunch of stuff…and then where the research design goes is very open-ended.”

Josh’s research proposal examined how reductions in military spending affect how people perceive international alliances. “I came into the fellowship wondering if that was the project I wanted to pursue in terms of presenting a research design but not really sure,” he says. As the fellowship continued, though, he focused in on that idea, especially as the readings added another potential framework for the question. Josh was already familiar with the Bloomington school’s theories of collective action, but as an Oskar Morgenstern Fellow, he also started to view alliances through the lens of exchange. “I don't know [if] I would have put [collective action and exchange] quite so closely together as two ways one could explain the same thing—allied spending decisions—that could have very different consequences for how people view alliances,” he says. “So I think it inspired a potentially fruitful extension of the dissertation research.”