Humanities at Hertog

Christopher Utter is a professorial lecturer in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He has taught courses in the history of political philosophy, classical political philosophy, American political thought, American politics, and public affairs. His research focuses mainly on classical political philosophy with a particular interest in the problem of theory and practice in Plato and Aristotle.

Mary Elizabeth Halper is Dean of the Humanities at Hertog program and a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. Previously, she was Associate Director of the Hertog Foundation. She graduated with B.A.s in Philosophy and Classics from the University of Dallas and has since been devoted to liberal education in various forms.

John Harpham is a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University. He is an historian of political thought and an intellectual historian. His research examines ideas about slavery, freedom, and race, as well as the relation of such ideas to practices of enslavement and resistance across the Atlantic world. He is at work on a three-volume series about the ideas that were associated with the origins, development, and eventual abolition of slavery in the Anglo-American Atlantic world. The first volume, The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, is currently available from Harvard University Press.

Diana J. Schaub is Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland and a member of the Hoover Institution’s task force on The Virtues of a Free Society. From 2004 to 2009 she was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Matthew Dinan is an Associate Professor in the Great Books Program at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He does research on Ancient Greek, Christian, and 19th and 20th Century Political Philosophy.

Cheryl Miller is executive director at the Hertog Foundation. Previously, she served as deputy director of research in the Office of Presidential Speechwriting and as research assistant to David Brooks at The New York Times. Her reviews and commentary have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and The Weekly Standard. She graduated from the University of Dallas with Bachelor of Arts degrees in English and Politics.

Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on literature, culture, and higher education. Prior to his role at AEI, Dr. Scalia was an English professor with a specialty in 18th-century and early 19th-century British literature.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a Visiting Professor of Humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. He was previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s.

Benjamin Storey is a senior fellow in Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He recently co-authored a book with Jenna Silber Storey entitled Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment.

Jacob Howland is Chief Academic Officer and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX. His research focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, history, epic, and tragedy; the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud; Kierkegaard; and literary and philosophical responses to the Holocaust and Soviet totalitarianism.

She is an associate professor at the School of Civil Life and Leadership at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the themes of education, childhood, authority, and the family in historical and contemporary political thought. In addition to her research, she contributes book reviews and essays to the Hedgehog Review, National Affairs, The Point, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others.

Alex Priou is an Associate Professor of Political Theory at UATX. His research and teaching both focus on the history of political philosophy, with specialization in Plato and the Pre-Socratic poets and philosophers. He often writes for a broader audience on his Substack and Public Discourse and is the co-host of a weekly podcast The New Thinkery where he discusses a broad array of texts philosophical, historical, political, and literary.

Flagg Taylor is an Associate Professor of Government at Skidmore College, and serves on the Academic Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He is editor most recently of The Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Václav Benda, 1977–1989. He is currently writing a book on Czech dissent in the 1970s and 1980s and hosts The Enduring Interest podcast.

Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. His research in the history of political philosophy focuses on the Enlightenment. He is the author of Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life and Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity.

Thomas Merrill is an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He is the author of Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment. He is also the co-editor of three edited volumes, including The Political Thought of the Civil War.

Matthew Continetti is the director of domestic policy studies and the inaugural Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where his work is focused on American political thought and history, with a particular focus on the development of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement in the 20th century.

Martha Bayles is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and since 2003 she has taught humanities at Boston College. She is currently at work on a monograph on the threats to independent journalism around the world; and a book about the importance of “voluntary restraint” in the American tradition of free speech.

Eliot Cohen is the Robert E. Osgood Professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he has taught since 1990. He served as Dean of SAIS from 2019 to 2021. In addition to public service in the Department of Defense he served as Counselor of the Department of State from 2007 to 2009.

Darren Staloff is a retired Professor of History from the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of CUNY. Professor Staloff has published numerous papers and reviews on the subject of early American history.

Robert C. Bartlett is the Behrakis Professor of Hellenic Political Studies at Boston College. His principal area of research is classical political philosophy, with particular attention to the thinkers of ancient Hellas, including Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle. He is the co-translator of a new edition of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Boris Fishman is the author of the novels A Replacement Life and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes.

Molly Brigid McGrath is a professor of philosophy at Assumption University. She specializes in phenomenology, social ontology, and political philosophy, with particular interests in the works of Husserl, Aristotle, Searle, and classic texts by Plato, Aquinas, and Montesquieu.

Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher on faculty in Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School, where he co-directs the Human Network Initiative, and is a Faculty Member at the HMS Center for Bioethics. His philosophical work examines the connections between modes of intersubjectivity, community, and cognitive flourishing.

Jenna Silber Storey is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the co-author of a book with Benjamin Storey: Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment.

Antón Barba-Kay is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C. (He is also, at the moment, Visiting Professor of Humanities at Deep Springs College, in California.) He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, with a dissertation on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The bulk of his research has concentrated on the subjects of recognition and aesthetics in nineteenth-century German philosophy. He is also writing a book about the political and philosophical implications of the digital revolution.

Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. His research in the history of political philosophy focuses on the Enlightenment. He is the author of Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life and Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity.

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.

Amy Apfel Kass (1940 – 2015) was a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Senior Lecturer Emerita in the humanities at the University of Chicago, and coeditor of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. She was an award-winning teacher of classic texts.

Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the Madden-Jewett Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. From 2001 to 2005, he was chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics.