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
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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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Alan Charles Kors (B.A., Princeton; M.A. and Ph.D., Harvard) 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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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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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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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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