Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Humanities Program at Yale University. He is the author of Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006), as well as articles and essays on questions about political rhetoric and deliberation, the meaning of representative government, the relationship of politics and religion, and the place of emotions in political life.
He is finishing a book called The Heart of a Heartless World that examines the ethical, political and religious core of early nineteenth-century liberalism in the United States and France. He has also edited Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies (Princeton University Press, 2012), a collection of essays by the Rousseau scholar Robert Wokler. His writings have won various awards, including the First Book Prize of the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association.
He has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Yale’s major in Ethics, Politics and Economics and the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Political Science. In 2016 he founded the Citizens, Thinkers, Writers program for students in the New Haven public schools.