Seminar Directors
Adam F. Scrupski is a certified social studies teacher and former middle school principal, and was a faculty member at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education for thirty-five years. At Rutgers, he was director of teacher education for seven years and chair of the teacher education faculty for twelve years. In the latter position he led the state-financed project that constructed Rutgers' five-year teacher education program. He has supervised student teachers in social studies and has taught the social studies student-teaching seminar. Scrupski was employed by the New Jersey State Department of Education in its development of core goals in social studies. He led a team of social studies teachers in the construction of framework components for the core goal that related the humanities to learning experiences in history. Scrupski also served the New Jersey Council for the Humanities in supplementing its summer content-focused workshop with credit-bearing experiences for teacher participants. From 2001 to 2004, he was a member of the statewide committee to revise New Jersey's social studies goals. He received his Ed.D. from Rutgers University.
Bradford P. Wilson is Associate Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and occasional Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University. He is president of the Association for the Study of Free Institutions and Free Societies and editor of Academic Questions, the quarterly journal of the National Association of Scholars. Wilson is the author of Enforcing the Fourth Amendment: A Jurisprudential History and co-editor of American Political Parties and Constitutional Politics, Separation of Powers and Good Government, and The Supreme Court and American Constitutionalism. Wilson was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Moscow State University and the International Juridical Institute in Russia in 1994-95, and served three years as research associate to two Chief Justices of the United States, Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist. His Ph.D. is from The Catholic University of America.
Seminar Lecturers
John Agresto, Visiting Fellow, is former Acting Chancellor and Provost at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani and serves on its Board of Regents and Trustees, chairing its Academic Committee. He previously served as the Senior Advisor for Higher Education and Scientific Research for the Coalition Provisional Authority. From 1989 to 2000, Agresto served as President of St. John's College in Santa Fe. He has published in the areas of politics, law, and education, and has taught at the University of Toronto, Kenyon College, Duke University and the New School University. In 2002-03 he was Lily Senior Research Fellow at Wabash College and in the 1980s served as both administrative and policy head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book on the situation in Iraq, Mugged by Reality, was published by Encounter Books in 2007. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
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William B. Allen has served as a member of the National Council for the Humanities and as member and chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is a Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. He was formerly Director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (while on leave from MSU) and Dean and Professor at James Madison College, Michigan State University. He taught previously at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. Recognized for excellence in liberal education on the 1997 Templeton Honor Roll (individually and institutionally), he has been a Fulbright Fellow and a Kellogg National Fellow, and he received the international Prix Montesquieu. His most recent book is Habits of Mind: Fostering Access and Excellence in Higher Education (with Carol Allen; Transaction Publishers, 2003).
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Michael Benedict was a member of the Ohio State University faculty in 1970, retiring in 2005. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Illinois and his Ph.D. from Rice University. He has also been a visiting professor at M.I.T., Yale Law School, the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, and Hokkaido and Doshisha Universities in Japan. He also served as adjunct professor of The Ohio State University School of Law.
Professor Benedict is a recognized authority in Anglo-American constitutional and legal history, the history of civil rights and liberties, the federal system and the Civil War and Reconstruction. His The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1973) and A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction (1975) are standard reading for students of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He has authored a widely used textbook on American constitutional history, The Blessings of Liberty (1996, rev. ed. 2005), a companion Sources in American Constitutional History (1996), and a reader in Reconstruction History, The Fruits of Victory: Alternatives in Restoring the Union, 1865-1877 (1975, rev. ed. 1986). He also prepared the American Historical Association's bicentennial essay on the history of American civil liberty, Civil Rights and Liberties (1987) and co-edited The History of Ohio Law (2004).
Professor Benedict has published more than 40 essays in leading American history and law journals, as well as in books of essays. Some of these have been widely reprinted. A number have been updated and republished in his Preserving the Constitution: Essays on Politics and the Constitution in the Reconstruction Era (2006).
He has received many grants, fellowships, and other recognitions and is a fellow of the Society of American Historians. He is currently working on the constitutional politics of Reconstruction. Professor Benedict has also been an active member of the history profession. He currently serves as Parliamentarian of the American Historical Association, and is a past President of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He also serves on the committees, editorial boards, and advisory boards of numerous organizations, journals, and historical projects.
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Stanley C. Brubaker is Professor of Political Science at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and Director of Colgate's Washington, DC, Study Group program. He teaches constitutional law, political philosophy and American politics and government. His research has focused on constitutional theory and interpretation, freedom of speech, and philosophy of punishment. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Commentary, the Journal of Politics, the Review of Politics, the Public Interest, and Constitutional Commentary, among others. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Earhart Foundation. He is currently completing a book entitled, The Constitution of Self-Government, under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.
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Robert L. Clinton is professor and chair of political science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His two previously published books, Marbury v. Madison and Judicial Review (Kansas, 1989, 1991) and God and Man in the Law (Kansas, 1997), challenge long-held assumptions about the power of the Supreme Court and the foundations of Anglo-American constitutionalism. He has authored several book chapters and numerous articles in periodicals such as First Things, the American Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, and the Journal of Supreme Court History. In 2001, he gave a nationally-televised address at the United States Supreme Court, and in 2003 was awarded the Hughes-Gossett prize for best article in the Journal of Supreme Court History. He is currently completing another book entitled Accident and Design: Materialism and Human Nature at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, a study of the implications of naturalism and theism for social and political theory. He holds a Ph.D. in government from the University of Texas at Austin.
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Daniel L. Dreisbach is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. Following law school, he served as a judicial clerk for Circuit Judge Robert F. Chapman of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and for two years he practiced public interest law specializing in civil and religious liberties. He is author of Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York University Press, 2002) and Real Threat and Mere Shadow: Religious Liberty and the First Amendment (Crossway Books, 1987). He is editor of and contributor to The Sacred Rights of Conscience (Liberty Fund, forthcoming) (co-editor), The Founders on God and Government (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) (co-editor), Religion and Political Culture in JeffersonÕs Virginia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) (co-editor), and Religion and Politics in the Early Republic: Jasper Adams and the Church-State Debate (University Press of Kentucky, 1996). He has published numerous book chapters and articles in scholarly journals, including American Journal of Legal History, Baylor Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, Emory Law Journal, Journal of Church and State, North Carolina Law Review, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, and William and Mary Quarterly.
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Thomas Fleming was born in Jersey City in 1927 and began his writing career in 1960 with a book on the battle of Bunker Hill, Now We Are Enemies. He has since written over a dozen books on the Revolution, including studies of the battles of Yorktown and Springfield, prize winning biographies of Jefferson and Franklin, and a revisionist narrative of the nation's most momentous year, 1776: Year of Illusions. His latest book, The Perils of Peace, America's Struggle for Survival After Yorktown, was published by Smithsonian books on Oct. 9, 2007. It was a main selection of the History Book Club for December and a featured Alternate of the Book of the Month Club. An early review called it "riveting history that will educate even sophisticated readers."
In October 2005 Smithsonian Books published Washington's Secret War, the Hidden History of Valley Forge. Gordon Wood of Brown University called it "a superb retelling of the story of Valley Forge and its aftermath, demonstrating that reality is far more compelling than myth." Harlow Giles Unger, author of the prizewinning biography, Lafayette, wrote: "Fleming's brilliant work strips away the mythology from this critical event in American history and exposes the profiteers, incompetents and ideologues who transformed an ordinary winter into a hell unwarranted by weather or supply shortages."
Duel, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America, published in late 1999, won astonishing praise from fellow historians and reviewers. Thomas Slaughter of Notre Dame University declared: "Fleming gets the story right in ways that generations of historians have missed."
In 2007 Thomas Fleming was elected president of the Society of American Historians, a select group whose membership is limited to 250 "fellows" with notable reputations for both scholarship and writing ability. Previous presidents include Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and David McCullough. He has been president of the American branch of PEN, the international writers' organization. He has also been chairman of the American Revolution Round Table of New York.
He is currently the senior scholar at the National Center for the American Revolution at Valley Forge. He is a contributing editor to MHQ, the Quarterly Journal of Military History, and writes regularly for American Heritage and other magazines. He lives in New York with his wife, Alice, a well-regarded writer of books for young readers.
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Alan R. Gibson is associate professor of political science at California State University, Chico. In 2005-06, he was a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Gibson's research interests focus on the political thought of James Madison and the study of the American founding. He has published in Polity, History of Political Thought, The Review of Politics, and The Political Science Reviewer, and is finishing the second of two books on the historiography of the American founding. The first book, entitled Interpreting the Founding (University Press of Kansas, 2006), provides a broad overview of the post-Beardian study of the American founding; the second book, entitled Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Confrontations, examines the central debates generated by the modern study of the American founding. He has been a John Carter Brown fellow at Brown University, a Francis Hiatt fellow at the American Antiquarian Association, a Robert Middlekauf fellow at the Huntington Library, and a fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies in Charlottesville, Virginia. Gibson earned his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame.
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Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks are renowned on the New York scene for their commitment to preserving and authentically presenting 1920s jazz and dance music styles of the period between 1919 and the mid-1930s. In 30 years as a bandleader, Vince Giordano has become the authority on recreating the sounds of 1920s and '30s popular music. "I just love the energy of the early jazz," says Giordano. "I wanted to recapture some of that." A musician and arranger, Giordano is also a big-band historian and collector, and has more than 30,000 scores in his collection. In addition to playing the string bass, Giordano is a multi-instrumentalist on tuba, banjo, rhythm guitar, piano and drums, and bass saxophone, which anchors the Nighthawks' rhythm section on many Dixieland or “hot jazz” arrangements.
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Floyd Grave was trained at the Eastman School of Music (B.Mus. in Theory) and New York University (M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology). He teaches undergraduate courses in music history and directs graduate seminars in musicology, style analysis, and the history of music theory. He currently serves as an associate editor of The Journal of Musicology, published by the University of California Press. As a researcher, he specializes in 18th-century music theory, style, and aesthetics. Coauthor of a research guide to the music of Joseph Haydn and a book on the teachings of the innovative theorist and composer Abbˇ Georg Joseph Vogler (1749-1814), he has edited a volume of Vogler's keyboard works and a volume of ballet music by Vogler and his Mannheim colleague Christian Cannabich. He is a contributing author for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and his articles and reviews of books and music have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. His most recent book, The String Quartets of Joseph Haydn, coauthored with Margaret Grave, is published by Oxford University Press.
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Katherine Grier is the author of Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1930 (1997) and Pets in America: A History (2006), among other books and publications. She is professor of material culture studies in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, and adjunct professor of history at the University of Delaware. Grier received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Delaware.
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Rochelle Gurstein is the author of the The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art She has written a bi-weekly column, "Out of Time," for The New Republic Online, on why the world looks and feels the way it does. Her essays on intellectual history, aesthetics, and contemporary social and political matters have appeared in The New Republic, Salmagundi, Raritan, the American Scholar, and other publications.
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Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, and Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. He holds a Ph.D in American Studies and an M.A. in Government from Claremont Graduate School. He writes frequently on a wide range of current topics, including environmentalism, law, economics, and public policy. His is the author of four books, including The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980, the first of two volumes about Reagan and his effect on American political life. His latest book is Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Modern Statesmen.
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Carson L. Holloway is assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. In 2005-06, he was a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. His first book, All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, explored the accounts of music and politics offered by Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Nietzsche and addressed the contemporary controversy over the moral consequences of popular music. His most recent book, The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy, is a critique of political and moral theories derived from Darwinian evolution. He has published articles in The Review of Politics, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, and The Catholic Social Science Review. He is currently at work on a book on the moral and political thought of John Paul II and on an edited volume entitled Magnanimity and Statesmanship. Holloway earned his Ph.D. in political science from Northern Illinois University.
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David P. Jaffee is Professor of History at City College of New York, where he has taught for over 20 years. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Dr. Jaffee was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tokyo in 1992-93, was a Mellon Art History Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000, and was awarded the Winterthur Research Fellowship that same year. He has published and edited several books and articles and has also directed multiple new media projects for the National Endowment for the Humanities, CUNY, and Georgetown University.
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Harvey Klehr, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University. Specialization: Political Theory, Twentieth Century Political Ideologies. He received the Emory Williams Teaching Award (1983), Emory University Scholar-Teacher of the Year (1995) and the Thomas Jefferson Award (1999). His current research interests center around American communism and Soviet espionage in America. His most recent publication is In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage (Encounter Books, 2003). Dr. Klehr was recently nominated to be a member of the National Council on the Humanities. John Haynes and Harvey Klehr were the first U.S. historians who used the newly opened archives of the former Soviet Union to examine the history of American communism. Klehr received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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Lincoln Konkle is Professor of English at The College of New Jersey where he teaches courses in dramatic literature. He has published articles in scholarly journals and books on Thornton Wilder, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Edward Taylor, and J.B. Priestley. He co-edited the book Stephen Vincent Benet: Essays on His Life and Work (McFarland 2003) to which he also contributed an article on Benet's own stage and film adaptations of his short story The Devil and Daniel Webster. His book Thornton Wilder and The Puritan Narrative Tradition was published by the University of Missouri Press in 2006. He has served as Executive Director of the Thornton Wilder Society since Fall 2005. He co-directed Wilder in the Twenty-first Century, a three-day international conference held at TCNJ last October. Professor Konkle earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, master's at Kansas State University, and undergraduate degree at Indiana University.
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Alan Charles Kors (B.A., Princeton; M.A. and Ph.D., Harvard) is Professor History at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in European intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a special teaching interest in the deep intellectual transformation of European thought, and a special research interest in the relationships between orthodox and heterodox thought in France after 1650. He has published several books and many articles on early-modern French intellectual history, and was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (4 volumes, Oxford University Press, 2002). He regularly teaches, among other courses, History 415 (seventeenth-century European intellectual history); History 416 (eighteenth-century European intellectual history); and various seminars on the French Enlightenment, the history of classical liberalism, and the phenomenon of political disillusionment. He served for six years, after confirmation by the U.S. Senate, on the National Council for the Humanities, and he has received fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies and the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. In 2003-2004, he was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, lecturing around the country on early-modern intellectual history and on academic freedom. He has won the Lindback Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award for distinguished college teaching and several national awards for the defense of academic freedom. In 2005, at the White House, he received the National Humanities Medal, for, according to the citation, "his study of European intellectual thought and his dedication to the study of the humanities. A widely respected teacher, he is the champion of academic freedom." He serves on the Board of Governors of The Historical Society
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Michael McKeon was born in Chicago and received his B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a year at Queens' College, Cambridge, he returned to the US and Columbia University, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in eighteenth-century British literature. McKeon has taught principally at Boston University and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, where he is currently a Board of Governors Professor of Literature. He also has taught as a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Brandeis University, and Princeton University. McKeon has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Besides many articles, he has written Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis (1975); The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (1987); and The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (2005). McKeon also has edited Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (2000).
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James M. McPherson is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He has published numerous volumes on the Civil War, including Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War, This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, which won the prestigious Lincoln Prize in 1998, and the magisterial Battle Cry of Freedom, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History.
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Lucas Morel is the Garwood Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is on leave from his position as Associate Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University. He is a member of the scholarly advisory committee of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, Vice President of the Abraham Lincoln Institute, and a trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society. He is author of Lincoln's Sacred Effort: Defining Religion's Role in American Self-Government and editor of Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to "Invisible Man". Recent publications include "Lincoln, God, and Emancipation: A Promise Fulfilled" in Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment, "Lincoln's Political Religion and Religious Politics" in Religion and the American Presidency, and "The Dred Scott Dissents: McLean, Curtis, Lincoln, and the Public Mind" in the Journal of Supreme Court History. Morel holds a Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate School.
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Paul D. Moreno is the William and Bernice Grewcock Chair in the American Constitution at Hillsdale College. In 2005-06, he was a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Moreno's research interests focus on U.S. constitutional history, civil rights, and political economy. He is the author of From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933-1972 (1997) and the recently published Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History (2006). He is currently working on a book on the constitutional revolution of the New Deal. He serves as the historical consultant to the Michigan Supreme Court Historical Society and as secretary-treasurer of the Michigan Association of Scholars, and has been a John M. Olin faculty fellow. Moreno earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.
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Vincent Phillip Muñoz, 2008-09 William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. His recent writings have focused on the theme of religious liberty and the American Constitution. Religious Liberty and the American Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson on the Separation of Church & State is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and he currently is completing a manuscript on the original meaning of the Constitution's Religion Clauses. He appears on National Public Radio and Voice of America Radio and has testified before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee on the matter of "Hostility to Religious Expression in the Public Square." He holds a Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate School.
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Ronald J. Pestritto is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hillsdale College, where he teaches political philosophy, American political thought, and American politics, and holds the Charles and Lucia Shipley Chair in the American Constitution. He serves as a Senior Fellow of the College's Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. He has published seven books, including Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism and the recently released American Progressivism. Among his other books are an edited collection of Wilson's speeches and writings -- Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings, a three-book series on American political thought, and Founding the Criminal Law: Punishment and Political Thought in the Origins of America. He has also served as a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University. Dr. Pestritto earned his Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate University in 1996.
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Alan Cecil Petigny is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Florida. His book The Permissive Turn: Psychology, Secularization and Sex in Postwar America which looks at the liberalization of values and norms in the United States after World War II, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. Petigny has recently taught courses in America in the Sixties, America in the Fifties, American Social and Intellectual History: 1945-1975, and American History: 1877 to the Present. Among his research interests are the rise and fall of Freudian analysis in the twentieth century and anti-authoritarianism in American life after World War II. He received his Ph.D. in History from Brown University.
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Jeffrey J. Poelvoorde is associate professor of politics at Converse College in South Carolina. The recipient of several national teaching awards, he has written broadly on the founding period of American history and contemporary constitutional politics. His current book project is Executive Privileges, a constitutional analysis of the discretionary powers of the American presidency. Poelvoorde received his Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Virginia.
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Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. Headquarters. He is the author, co-author or editor of fourteen books, including Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left (Encounter Books,2001); Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (with Mary Habeck) (Yale University Press, 2001). The Rosenberg File (with Joyce Milton), (Yale University Press, 1997); Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996 (The Free Press, 1996.); and The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (with Harvey Klehr) (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996). His most recent book, A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel, co-authored with Allis Radosh, was released in May 2009. His articles have appeared in such publications as Partisan Review, The New Republic, The New Criterion, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Journal of American History, The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. Radosh has served as a Senior Research Associate, the Center for Communitarian Studies at George Washington University; as Professor of History in The Graduate Faculty, City University of New York; Research Director for the United States Information Agency, and as Associate Director of the Office of the President, the American Federation of Teachers.
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Paul A. Rahe is Jay P. Walker Professor of American History at the University of Tulsa. His first book, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution, was an alternative selection of the History Book Club and was reissued in a three-volume paperback edition in 1994. He coedited Montesquieu's Science of Politics: Essays on the Spirit of the Laws (2001) and has published chapters in numerous other edited works as well as articles in such journals as The American Journal of Philology, The American Historical Review, The Review of Politics, The Journal of the Historical Society, The American Spectator, and The Wilson Quarterly. He is the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and other research fellowships. Rahe received his Ph.D. from Yale University.
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Matt Ruben received his PhD in English and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania , where he received a Ben Franklin Fellowship, an Andrew Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, the Dean's Scholar Award, and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. Since 1993, Dr. Ruben has taught writing, film, and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College , and Haverford College . For the past two summers he has served as a writing instructor for public school teachers participating in the New Jersey Council of the Humanities' summer seminars.
Dr. Ruben's scholarly work focuses on the intersection of American political history, popular culture, and urban development. Over the past 15 years he has published scholarly articles in journals and anthologies in the fields of English, cultural studies, film, and anthropology; and has presented his work at dozens of professional conferences around the country. Dr. Ruben lives in Philadelphia, where he is active in city politics and community volunteer work.
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Robert St. George is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on American cultural history, material culture, vernacular landscapes, and heritage productions in North America, England, Ireland, and Iceland. He teaches undergraduate courses on such topics as early American cultural history, witchcraft in the early modern world, public culture, American vernacular architecture, performing history, and American consumer culture. St. George is a graduate of Hamilton College (AB, 1976), the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware (MA, 1978), and the University of Pennsylvania (MA, 1980, PhD., 1982). He is currently a member of the graduate programs in Folklore and in Historic Preservation, and is Director of the Program in Public Culture in Penn's Master of Liberal Arts curriculum. Among his publications are The Wrought Covenant: Source Materials for the Study of Craftsmen and Community in Southeastern New England, 1620-1700 (1979), Material Life in America, 1600-1850 (1988), Conversing By Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (1998), and Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (2000). A past winner of the Penn's Lindback Award for distinguished teaching (1999), he has held fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society (1980), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1988, 1997), the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History (2000), and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation ( 2000-01). He is currently completing a book on popular violence and law in eighteenth-century Maine, exploring the class and religious tensions that surfaced in John Adams's last legal case.
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Amity Shlaes is a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition to writing on political economy, she writes on taxes. She is a contributor to Marketplace, the public radio show. She has appeared on numerous radio and television shows over the years. Miss Shlaes was formerly a columnist for the Financial Times and, before that a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, specializing in economics. In the early 1990s she served as the Journal's features, or "op ed" editor. Prior to that she followed the collapse of communism for the Wall Street Journal/Europe. Over the years she has published in the National Review, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs (on the German economy), the American Spectator, the Suddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit. In 2002 she contributed an article on the US tax code to the thirtieth anniversary anthology of Tax Notes, the scholarly journal. Miss Shlaes has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary, her field's best known prize. In 2002 she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy. In 2003, she spent several months at the American Academy in Berlin as the JP Morgan Fellow for finance and economy. In 2004, she gave the Bradley lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Her essay, titled "The Chicken vs. the Eagle" looked at the effect of the National Recovery Administration on the entrepreneur in the New Deal. Miss Shlaes is the author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (Harper Perennial, 2007; paperback release in May 2008). She is the author of The Greedy Hand (Random House/Harvest paperback), a national bestseller on America's experience with its tax code. She is also the author of Germany: The Empire Within (Farrar, Straus), a book about German national identity. In 2004, she was, with the late Robert L. Bartley, co-author of the contribution on tax philosophy to Turning Intellect to Influence, an anthology chronicling the progress of free-market ideas as advanced by the Manhattan Institute. Miss Shlaes is a trustee of the German Marshall Fund; she sits on the jury for the American Academy's fellows as well as the jury for the Bastiat Prize.
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Darren Staloff is the 2006-07 Garwood Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is on leave from his position as Professor of Early American History at The City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He received his undergraduate and graduate training at Columbia University and served as a postdoctoral fellow and National Endowment of the Humanities Scholar at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture. Professor Staloff's primary interests are early American intellectual and political history. He is the author of two books, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding (Hill and Wang, 2005). He has also designed and performed in several taped lecture series on American History and the History of Philosophy with the Teaching Company. He is currently working on a book-length treatment of the Enlightenment in America.
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Richard Sylla is the Henry Kaufman Professor of The History of Financial Institutions and Markets and Professor of Economics, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He teaches courses in financial history, economic history of the United States, and firms and markets. His primary areas of research include historical studies of money, banking, and finance. He is the author of several books, including The American Capital Market and A History of Interest Rates (now in its 4th edition). His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, Small Business and American Life: A History and Business and Economic History. Sylla is also on the editorial board of many journals that include the Financial History Review, Enterprise and Society, and Economic and Financial History Abstracts. He has been the recipient of several awards and grants, including the National Science Foundation grant, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grants, and the Citibank Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Stern School. He has served as president of the Economic History Association and is currently a trustee of the Museum of American Financial History. Sylla received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
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C. Bradley Thompson is the BB&T Research Professor at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. In 2004-05, he was a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has also been a visiting fellow at Harvard University and the University of London. Thompson is the author of the prize-winning book John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty. He has also edited The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams and Antislavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader and was an associate editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. His current book project is on "The Ideological Origins of American Constitutionalism." Thompson is also an occasional writer for The Times Literary Supplement of London. He has lectured around the country on education reform and the American Revolution, and his op-ed essays have appeared in scores of newspapers around the country and abroad. Thompson's lectures on the political thought of John Adams have twice appeared on C-SPAN television.
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Jackson Toby, Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Rutgers University, was awarded a Ph. D. degree in sociology at Harvard University in 1950. He was Director of the Institute for Criminological Research at Rutgers from 1968 to 1994. In addition to numerous professional publications he also has written several dozen op ed pieces (directed at the general public) concerning criminological topics including his major research interest, the causes of and remedies for school violence, in such newspapers as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. One of his popular articles, "Let Them Drop Out: A Response to Killings in Suburban High Schools" appeared in The Weekly Standard on April 9, 2001 It reflected his heretical view of the high school dropout problem that he set forth in "Of Dropouts and Stay-ins: The Gershwin Approach", The Public Interest, Spring 1989, pp. 3-13, and other places. His most recent scholarly article—about streaking—appeared in the November 2005 issue of the Journal of Classical Sociology. He has been listed in Who’s Who in America for more than forty years. His forthcoming book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America, will be published by Praeger Publishers in November 2009.
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Bradley C. S. Watson holds the Philip M. McKenna Chair in American and Western Political Thought at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, PA. He has also held visiting faculty appointments at Princeton University and Claremont McKenna College. As Fellow in Politics and Culture at Saint Vincent's Center for Political and Economic Thought, he directs the Center's Government and Political Education Lecture Series and its Culture and Policy Conferences, in addition to its George Washington Fellowship Program. His teaching areas include political philosophy and American political thought and institutions. Watson has authored or edited several books, including Civil Rights and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy, Courts and the Culture Wars, Civic Education and Culture, and The West at War (2006). His book Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence is scheduled to appear in January 2009. Prior to becoming a political scientist, he practiced as a civil litigation attorney in Vancouver, Canada. He was educated in Canada at the University of British Columbia, where he received a B.A. in economics and political science, and at the Queen's University Faculty of Law, where he received an LL.B. (J.D.); in Belgium at the Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Louvain, where he received an M.Phil.; and in the United States at the Claremont Graduate University, where he received an M.A. and a Ph.D. with concentrations in political philosophy and American government.
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Keith E. Whittington is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University and currently director of graduate studies in the Department of Politics. He is the author of Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning, and Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review, and Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History (which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and courts and the J. David Greenstone Award for best book in politics and history), and editor (with Neal Devins) of Congress and the Constitution and editor (with R. Daniel Kelemen and Gregory A. Caldeira) of The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics. He has published widely on American constitutional theory and development, federalism, judicial politics, and the presidency. He has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow and American Council of Learned Societies Junior Faculty Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas School of Law. He is currently working on a political history of the judicial review of federal statutes and a volume of cases and materials on American constitutionalism.
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