Austin (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science, and an MA student in the Department of Gender and Race Studies. He is the recipient of the Department of Political Science “Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching” award in 2019, the College of Arts and Sciences “Outstanding Service by a Graduate Student” award in 2019 for his work improving conditions for the queer/trans community at the University of Alabama, and a 2021-2022 “Graduate Council Fellowship” to support his dissertation research.   He studies political representation in global politics in two senses: first, he studies political representation as an institutional relationship between individuals/groups and an individual/group they contract to represent them in governance institutions, and second in a discursive sense, as the ability for nation(s)/people(s) to represent themselves with linguistic/legal categories available to them in international law and institutions. In particular, his work examines military interventions in politics through the Coup Agency and Mechanism dataset for which he is a co-manager (militarycoups.org), and discursive representations by underrepresented nation(s) and people(s) through the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO).