I was born and mostly raised in the US South. But I spent two formative years as a kid in Bonn, (West) Germany, where I went to an echt kindergarten and first played soccer. After moving back to the US, I went to high school in Alabama and to college at the University of Mississippi. A Fulbright fellowship took me to back to Germany for a postgraduate year of teaching and study; that year, I joined a band of erstwhile krautrockers and became a fan of Bundesliga club Borussia Mönchengladbach, whose games I still watch on weekends. I then spent several years in Berlin and New York before doing an MA at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva and then a PhD at Duke. I now call Southern California home.