JMC 2021 Summer Institute: “Civic Education and the American Republic”
This summer, emerging scholars of American political thought and history convened in Douglasville, Georgia from August 1-7, 2021 to consider “Civic Education and the American Republic.” Participants attended a variety of seminars and presentations led by accomplished faculty and participated in professional development workshops.
This Summer Institute allowed participants to examine the foundations of republican self-rule in connection with the maintenance of that republic through education to citizenship. Participants had the opportunity to connect with other early-career scholars as well as senior faculty with similar interests and concerns. The joined JMC’s community of fellows dedicated to the study and teaching of America’s founding principles, consisting of some 1,000+ JMC Fellows on over 300 college campuses across the country.
Institute Faculty
Steven Smith (Yale University): “Education and Responsible Citizenship”, “What is Patriotic Education”
Nicholas Buccola (Linfield College): “Reform or Revolution? Frederick Douglass on Resistance as Civic Education”
Stephen Wrinn (University of Notre Dame Press): Book Publishing Workshop
Benjamin Kleinerman (Baylor University): “The Federalist Papers as an Education in Reasonable Politics”
Wilfred McClay (University of Oklahoma): “Civic Education Rightly Understood”
James Ceaser (University of Virginia): Syllabus Workshop
Diana Schaub (Loyola University Maryland): “Lincoln’s Lyceum Address: The Statesman as Preceptor of the People”
Steven B. Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science and Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is also the Co-Director of Yale’s Center for the Study of Representative Institutions(YSCRI) which focuses on the theory and practice of representative government in the Anglo-American world. His research has focused on the history of political philosophy with special attention to the problem of the ancients and moderns, the relation of religion and politics, and theories of representative government. Aside from Reclaiming Patriotism, his best known publications include, among others, Spinoza, Liberalism, and Jewish Identity (1997), Reading Leo Strauss (2006), Political Philosophy (2012), and Modernity and its Discontents (2016).
Professor Smith is a JMC faculty partner.
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Nicholas Buccola is the Elizabeth & Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science at Linfield College. His teaching and research interests are in political theory and public law. Professor Buccola is the founding director of the Frederick Douglass Forum on Law, Rights, and Justice, a partner program in JMC’s Pacific Northwest Initiative, and has written extensively on the political thought of Frederick Douglass. He has published essays on a wide variety of topics including the debate over same-sex marriage, Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of socialism, and the political philosophies of Judith Shklar and Leo Strauss. He is a recipient of the Allen and Pat Kelley Faculty Scholar Award, and a two-time recipient of the Samuel Graf Faculty Achievement Award. Professor Buccola is also the book review editor for the JMC supported journal, American Political Thought.
Professor Buccola is a JMC faculty partner.
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Stephen Wrinn is the Director of Notre Dame Press at the University of Notre Dame. From 2002-2015, he served as the director of University Press of Kentucky and previously was editorial vice president and executive editor of history and political science for Rowman & Littlefield Publishers and editorial director of Lexington Books. He has over 20 years of experience in scholarly publishing. Wrinn also has experience from the author’s side of publishing and is the author of Civil Rights in the Whitest State: Vermont’s Perceptions of Civil Rights, 1945-1968 (University Press of America, 1997).
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Benjamin Kleinerman is the RW Morrison Professor of Political Science at Baylor University. He is also editor of The Constitutionalist and on the Board of Directors of the Jack Miller Center. Professor Kleinerman received his B.A. at Kenyon College in Political Science and his Ph.D. at Michigan State University in Political Science. Kleinerman was the founding Chair of the American Political Thought section of APSA. His research focuses mostly on presidential power in relation to the separation of powers. He has published articles on this subject in Perspectives on Politics, APSR, and several edited volumes, including Nomos and The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Professor Kleinerman’s first book, The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power, was published by the University Press of Kansas and he is currently working on a book titled The Crisis Presidency. Professor Kleinerman teaches classes on American political thought and political institutions.
Professor Kleinerman is a JMC board member.
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Wilfred M. McClay is the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College. He previously served as Professor of History and G.T & Libby Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. Bill is an American intellectual historian and noted public intellect. He has taught at Georgetown, Tulane, John Hopkins, University of Dallas, and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he held the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities. He is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a member of the Philadelphia Society.
Bill has received fellowship awards from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education, among others, and written multiple books and articles.
Professor McClay is a JMC board member.
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James Ceaser is the Harry F. Byrd Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1976. In addition, he is the Director for Constitutionalism and Democracy and was a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written several books on American politics and political thought, including Presidential Selection (Princeton University PRess, 1979), Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), and Reconstructing America (Yale University Press, 2000). Professor Ceaser has held visiting professorships at the University of Florence, the University of Basel, Oxford University, the University of Bordeaux, and the University of Rennes. He is a frequent contributor to the popular press, and he often comments on American Politics for the Voice of America.
Professor Ceaser is a JMC board member.
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Diana Schaub is a Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland and a contributing editor at New Atlantis. She is a member of the Hoover Institution’s Jill and Boyd Smith Task Force on the Virtues of a Free Society. In 2001, she was the recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters and from 2004 to 2009 she was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Professor Schaub is the author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), along with a number of book chapters and articles in the fields of political philosophy and American political thought. She is a co-editor of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song (ISI, 2011). Professor Schaub’s work has also appeared in National Affairs, The New Criterion, The Public Interest, The American Enterprise, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, The American Interest, and City Journal.
Professor Schaub is a JMC faculty partner.
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