“Put your pencils down, I am going to tell you a story”

My primary focus has been the study of opposing political groups in the United States, Israel, and Northern Ireland. At the beginning of my career, I was appointed to a post at Southern Oregon College (now Southern Oregon University) where I brought revolutionary members of the left and right into my classroom. Working with my students, we developed models that illustrated the sources of political attitudes and methods for resolving community conflicts. My early research was centered in Oregon and California, but later I moved into the southern and eastern areas of the United States where I did a series of interviews with members of the Ku Klux Klan and various racial and ethnic groups in urban areas.

After a long tenure as a professor of political science at Southern Oregon University, I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Israel. I spent my days with the Israelis in Jerusalem and my evenings with Palestinians in Ramallah. One year later, I accepted a teaching post as a professor of politics at The Queen's University of Belfast where I split my teaching duties with the task of developing contacts inside paramilitary units on both sides of the conflict in Ulster. I conducted on-the-ground research on a daily basis in both Catholic and Protestant working-class neighborhoods. After more than a decade in the North of Ireland, I returned to the US as a professor of political science at Portland State University where I offered a course titled "War and Peace in Northern Ireland."

Looking back on my work, I began studying Democrats and Republicans, then I moved on to liberals and conservatives, later I began to focus on radicals and reactionaries, then I went international contacting Israelis and Palestinians, and finally my work today is centered on the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland.