Our 2016-17 lecture series will address the theme of “Tocqueville and the American Republic.” The following speakers will be visiting Furman on behalf of the Tocqueville Program this academic year:
2017 Lecturers
Jean Yarbrough is Professor of Government and the Gary M. Pendy, Sr. Professor of Social Sciences at Bowdoin College, where she teaches Political Philosophy and American Political Thought. She earned her BA from Cedar Crest College and her MA and PhD from the New School for Social Research. She has twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She serves on the editorial boards of The Review of Politics and Polity, and was President of the New England Political Science Association in 2005. Dr. Yarbrough is the author and editor of numerous books, articles and essays in American Political Thought, Public Policy, and Political Philosophy, including American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (Kansas, 1998), and The Essential Jefferson (Hackett, 2006). Her most recent book, Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition (Kansas, 2013), won the Richard E. Neustadt Award, a prize given annually by the American Political Science Association for the best book on the Presidency.
Joshua Mitchell is Professor of Political Theory at Georgetown University. He served as Chairman of the Government Department and was Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs at the School of Foreign Service in Qatar. During the 2008-10 academic years, Dr. Mitchell took a leave from Georgetown to serve as Acting Chancellor of The American University of Iraq – Sulaimani. Dr. Mitchell’s research interest lies in the relationship between political thought and theology in the West. He has published numerous articles and books, including Not By Reason Alone: Religion, History, And Identity in Early Modern Thought (Chicago, 1993), The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (Chicago, 1995), Plato’s Fable: on the Mortal Condition in Shadowy Times (Princeton, 2006), and Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age (Chicago, 2013). He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Reinhold Niebuhr and the Politics of Hope. Dr. Mitchell received a Bachelor of General Studies from the University of Michigan, an MA in Sociology from the University of Washington, and an MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago. In addition to teaching at Georgetown University, Dr. Mitchell is an avid conservationist, working to restore his small forest on the Eastern Shore and helping to develop the next generation of solar-electric sailboats.
Aurelian Craiutu is Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has published extensively in the field of modern French political thought from Montesquieu to Raymond Aron. He received his BA in Economics from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, Romania, and his MA and PhD in Political Science from Princeton University. In 2000, he won the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award for the best doctoral dissertation in political theory. Dr. Craiutu’s publications include Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), which won a 2004 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award, Tocqueville on America after 1840 (Cambridge, 2009; with Jeremy Jennings), America through European Eyes (Cambridge, 2009, with Jeffrey C. Isaac), A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830(Princeton, 2012), and Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (U. Penn Press, 2016) as well a newly revised English edition of Madame de Staël’s Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (Liberty Fund, 2008). He has received awards and grants from several institutions including the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the American Council of Learned Societies.