INSTRUCTOR OF RECORD

Civic Thought: An Introduction Spring 2026

Miami University

This course explores 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, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, and Frederick Douglass. 

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, Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, Gaudium et Spes, Dignitatis Humanae, Dives in Misericordia, and Evangelium Vitae. A highlight of the course was a series of dramatic debates which I facilitates and graded, in which students brought political issues to fictional Church gatherings. 

COURSES IN PREPARATION (provisional syllabi available on request) 

Introduction to Contemporary Political Theory
Introduction to Contemporary Political Theory is organised thematically to familiarise students with some of the questions frequently posed about the political obligations of citizenship, 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.

Introduction to Political Theory

Introduction to Political Theory provides a historical overview of the field of political theory. Lectures or 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. 

Black Citizenship in the American Republic

This course is adapted from a course I taught in Spring 2026 on what citizenship means and how much regime type matters. It begins with a look at Hannah Arendt's "What is Freedom?" and takes students through the original and the final drafts of the Declaration of Independence, selections from Danielle Allen's Our Declaration, Herbert Storing's "Slavery and the Moral Foundations of the American Republic" and Paul Finkelman's "Slavery and the Constitutional Convention", Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?", Lincoln's speeches at Peoria and on the Dred Scott Decision, the Gettysburg Address, Douglass's ambivalent "Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln", selections from DuBois's Black Reconstruction, Vijay Phulwani's "A Splendid Failure? Black Reconstruction and Du Bois's Tragic Vision of Politics", selections from Teresa Zackodnik's Press, Platform, Pulpit, MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail, Malcolm X's The Ballot or the Bullet, Herbert Storing's critique of MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail, and Arendt's "Thinking and Moral Considerations" and "Truth and Politics" 

Indian Political Thought and Chinese Political Thought: An Introduction

This course provides a brief introduction to prominent authors and texts in the history of Indian political thought and Chinese political thought. In the Indian political thought section of the course, students will read about the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and about the roles that the concepts of dharma and artha played in the daily lives of citizens in the Mauryan period. They will also read selections from Kautilya's Arthashastra and from the political writings of Mohandas Gandhi. In the Chinese political thought part of the course, students will read about Confucius, Confucians, and about the critics of Confucius and Confucians. They will also read selections from Laozi's Daodejing, and from the writings of Mao Tse-tung. 

History of Western Political Thought I 

Broad overview using selections from primary sources. From Thucydides to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

History of Western Political Thought II 

Broad overview using selections from primary sources. From Mary Wollstonecraft to Hannah Arendt.

Early Modern Political Theory 

Seminar style overview of Early Modern political theorists. Full texts will be assigned. The course will cover Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jeacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

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