His research and teaching focus on security studies, international relations theory, international history and politics, and United States foreign policy. Taliaferro is the author of Balancing Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery (Cornell University Press, 2004), which won the American Political Science Association’s Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Award for the Best Book in International History and Politics. His articles have appeared in International Security, Security Studies, and Political Psychology and several edited volumes. He is co-editor, along with Steven E. Lobell and Norrin P. Ripsman, of Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and of The Challenge of Grand Strategy: The Great Powers and the Broken Balance between the World Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2012).