Educating the Statesman

Shilo Brooks

Shilo Brooks is President and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center and Professor of Practice in the Department of Political Science at SMU. He was previously Executive Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, where he taught in the Department of Politics. Brooks is host of The Free Press’ Old School podcast and author of a forthcoming book from Penguin Random House. He has also published scholarly work in political theory and the humanities.

Winner of Princeton University’s Phi Beta Kappa teaching award, Brooks is a distinguished lecturer on topics ranging from statesmanship and civic leadership to American political thought, the history of political philosophy, liberal education, and the ethics of science and technology. He has also taught at the University of Colorado, where he designed and directed the Engineering Leadership Program to explore the ramifications of technology on democratic society, and was Associate Faculty Director of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, where he taught original works of the world’s greatest writers and thinkers. Dr. Brooks has also held academic appointments in the Department of Government at Bowdoin College and the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia.

Jenna Silber Storey

Jenna Silber Storey is a Ravenel Curry Chair in Civic Thought, 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.

Dr. Storey’s work concentrates on liberal education, civic thought, and the relationship between the university and society. She has developed a series of initiatives in partnership with Johns Hopkins University to provide pathways for collaboration between JHU faculty and AEI scholars, to support ideologically heterodox students who aspire to careers in academia, and to host discussions to explore the emerging academic field of civic thought and practice.

Previously, Dr. Storey was assistant professor in politics and international affairs and the executive director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University. In addition to Furman University, she has taught at the University of Chicago; the Buckley Program at Yale University; the Hertog Summer Studies Program in Washington, DC; and the Tikvah Fund in Princeton, New Jersey. Earlier she worked as executive assistant to the superintendent for the Boston University–Chelsea Schools partnership. She served as a board member of Veritas Preparatory School in Greenville, South Carolina, from 2019 to 2021, and now serves as a board member of the St. Jerome Institute in Washington, DC, the Center for Constitutional Liberty at Benedictine College, and the Honors College at Tulsa University.

Dr. Storey is the coauthor, with her husband, Benjamin Storey, of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press, 2021). Together, the Storeys are working on a book titled The Art of Choosing: How Liberal Education Should Prepare You for Life.

Dr. Storey’s work has been published in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Affairs, Humanities, the Boston Globe, National Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, American Purpose, Society, the New Atlantis, City Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, and First Things. She has lectured at institutions such as Oxford University, West Point, the City College of New York, American University, the University of Notre Dame, the Institute for Classical Education, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. She has also delivered papers at the American Political Science Association conference and other disciplinary conferences.

Dr. Storey has a PhD from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought and a BA from the University Professors Program at Boston University. She spent time in Germany as a visiting student at the University of Tübingen and as an exchange student at Dresden University.