Professor King is a comparativist with a particular focus on the Middle East and North Africa. He teaches the following courses: Introduction to Comparative Politics, the Politics of North Africa, Authoritarianism in Comparative Perspective, The Middle East in Comparative Perspective, and Politics of the Third World.

Professor King is the author of Liberalization Against Democracy: The Local Politics of Economic Reform in Tunisia (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2003, "Sustaining Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa," Political Science Quarterly, Fall 2007, and The New Authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2010).