Statesmanship & Founding

Mary Townsend is an associate professor of philosophy at St. John’s University, Queens, NY. Her 2017 book, The Woman Question in Plato’s Republic was named required reading by University of Pennsylvania’s Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and her academic work on Plato, Beauvoir, and the American abolitionist Julia Ward Howe has appeared in Hypatia, Polis, and Social Philosophy Today.

Christopher Utter is Associate Director of the Lincoln Scholars program and term professorial lecturer in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He regularly teaches courses in the Lincoln Scholars program as well as upper level political theory courses. His research focuses mainly on classical political philosophy with a particular interest in the problem of theory and practice in Plato and Aristotle.

Meredith Potter is the Executive Director of the American Security Fund. Previously, she held positions at the U.S. Department of State, Atlantic Council, U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, and served as Director of Research & Policy for Dr. Henry Kissinger. She is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a double graduate of Yale University (BA, MA), where she completed the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and wrote her thesis under the advisement of General Stanley McChrystal.

Samuel Zeitlin is Lecturer in Modern Intellectual History at University College London, specializing in political thought, international relations, and the history of philosophy.

Diana Schaub is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where her work is focused on American political thought and history, particularly Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, African American political thought, Montesquieu, and the relevance of core American ideals to contemporary challenges and debates. Concurrently, she is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland, where she taught for almost three decades.

Flagg Taylor is the Executive Director of the Center for Civics, Culture, & Society, at Miami University. His research specialty is in the history of political thought and American government, especially the question of executive power. He is Chair of the Academic Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Vickie Sullivan is the Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science and teaches and studies political thought and philosophy.  She also maintains teaching and research interests in politics and literature. She has published extensively on Montesquieu and Machiavelli and is the co-editor of  Shakespeare’s Political Pageant.

Jenna Silber Storey is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and co-director of AEI’s Center for the Future of the American University. She is concurrently an SNF Agora Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, and a research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. She also serves on the executive committee of the Alliance for Civics in the Academy.