INSTRUCTOR OF RECORD

Dimensions of American Civic Thought     Fall 2025

Miami University

This course is composed of units on the role of natural rights in the American Revolution, on the Constitution and the idea republican self-government, on the relationship of race and slavery to the American Republic, on the notion of commerce in a free society, and on the place of religious freedom in politics. It seeks to convey the importance of taking the intellectual history of contemporary political structures seriously. 

Florentine Mysteries: Exploring the Birthplace of the Italian Renaissance with Niccolò Machiavelli       Spring 2023

University of Notre Dame

In 1520, Giulio de Medici (Pope Clement VII) commissioned a history of Florence from Niccolò Machiavelli, which the latter reluctantly accepted. This commission produced Florentine Histories—a work which, much like others by its author, subverts the conventions of its genre. It is revealing of Machiavelli’s own political thought. Yet, much like his other works, it leaves a lot unsaid. In this course, we read excerpts from Florentine Histories and Machiavelli’s other major works to become acquainted with Machiavelli’s Florence. Discussions focussed on the significance of internal Florentine politics (family feuds, murders, the works), the rise of the Medici, and the significance of republicanism.

TEACHING ASSISTANT

Introduction to Political Theory

Professor Dana Villa                                         Fall 2022

University of Notre Dame

I facilitated two discussion sections on the texts that were assigned and the weekly lectures that the students attended. The course was designed to convey to the students that political theory deals with the relation between ethics and politics, a relation which is by no means self-evident and which has been characterised in often conflicting ways by major political thinkers. We covered Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and "Thinking and Moral Considerations", selections from Thucydides's War between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, Plato's Apology, Crito, and The Republic, Sophocles's Antigone, Machiavelli's The Prince and Discourses on Livy, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Mill's On Liberty. 

Introduction to Political Theory

Professor Joshua Kaplan                 Spring 2022

University of Notre Dame

I attended the lectures, graded assignments, assessments, and essays, and held weekly office hours. This course was designed to demonstrate how political theory can enhance our study of politics. It began with contemporary rational choice theory as a way of posing two characteristic problems of modern politics: How can people with different preferences agree on a common course of action? How can the pursuit of self-interest lead to cooperation rather than conflict? We then studied how these questions have been posed and answered by traditional works of political theory. We read Melville's Benito Cereno, selections from Plato's Euthyphro, Crito, Apology, and The Republic, Aristotle's The Politics, Machiavelli's The Prince and Discourses on Livy, Hobbes's Leviathan, Rousseau's Social Contract, The Federalist Papers, Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 

Catholicism and Politics

Professor Daniel Philpott       Fall 2021

University of Notre Dame

I attended the lectures, graded weekly online discussion posts, periodic assessments, and essays. The course began with an investigation of classic Catholic ideas about politics as found in Scripture and in tradition up through the Second Vatican Council. It then examined how the Church thinks about a range of contemporary issues and how it draws from its classical thinking in doing so. We read some Early Church documents, selections from Augustine's City of God, Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, Gustavo Guttierez's Essential Writings, and papal encyclicals like the Syllabus of Errors, Gaudium et Spes, Dignitatis Humanae, Evangelium Vitae, and Dives in Misericordia. A highlight of the course was a series of dramatic debates which I facilitates and graded, in which students brought alive Catholic political issues in the context of a fictional Church gatherings. 

COURSES IN PREPARATION (provisional syllabi and detailed course descriptions available on request)

Civic Thought: An Introduction

This course will explore what citizenship means, how much regime type matters, and consider the often-competing roles that virtue and statesmanship play in politics through selections form the works of authors like Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Plato, Aristotle, Kautilya, Niccolò Machiavelli, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., John Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, and Frederick Douglass. 

Introduction to Contemporary Political Theory/ Introduction to Political Theory
These introductory courses to contemporary political theory and political theory more generally take different approaches. The former is organised thematically to familiarise students with some of the questions frequently posed about political obligation and power, democracy and equality, justice, private property and public responsibility, feminism, socialism, and virtue ethics. Students will read selections from the works of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Robert Nozick, Michel Foucault, G.A. Cohen, Iris Marion Young, Bernard Williams, Susan Okin, Peter Singer, Matha Nussbaum, and Alasdair MacIntyre. The latter provides a historical overview of the field of political theory. Discussions will evaluate the bearings of selections from the works of Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Hannah Arendt on questions concerning the idea of the state, the use of force, democracy and imperialism. 

History of Political Thought I 

(Thucydides to Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

History of Political Thought II 

(Mary Wollstonecraft to Hannah Arendt)

Early Modern Political Theory 

(Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jeacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft)

Introduction to International Relations Theory
(Structural, Defensive, Offensive, and Hegemonic Realism, Liberal Institutionalism, Democratic Peace Theory, Economic Interdependence Theory, Ideas and Norms, Identity, Nationalism, and Critical Theory)