American Politics and Government Summit

Allen C. Guelzo is a New York Times best-selling author, American historian, and commentator on public issues. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard,  National Review, and the Claremont Review of Books, amongst other publications and many media outlets. In 2018, he was a winner of the Bradley Prize, along with Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal and Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute.

He is Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar and Director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship. Previously, he was Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, and the Director of Civil War Era Studies, and the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College. During 2010-11 and again in 2017-18, he served as the  Garwood Visiting Professor in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He holds an MA and PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Among his many award-winning publications, he is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America; Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America; Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas; and Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (in the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introductions’ series). In 2012, he published Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and in 2013 Alfred Knopf published his book on the battle of Gettysburg, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. His most recent books are Redeeming the Great Emancipator; Reconstruction: A Concise History, and Robert E. Lee: A Life. 

James Hankins is an American intellectual historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance. He is the General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library and the Associate Editor of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum at Harvard University, where he is a professor in the History Department. In 2018, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. 

Hankins has been a Fulbright Scholar, a member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, a fellow and visiting professor at the Villa I Tatti, a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. In 2010, he was Carlyle Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford. In 2014, he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Hankins is the author or editor of over twenty volumes and more than eighty articles, including The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni; Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance; Marsilio Ficino: Platonic Theology; and more recently Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy; and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena. 

Larry P. Arnn is the 12th president of Hillsdale College, where he is also a professor of politics and history. He received his B.A. from Arkansas State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School. He also studied at Worcester College, Oxford University, where he served as director of research for Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill. From 1985 to 2000, he served as president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. In 1996, he was the founding chairman of the California Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibited racial preferences in state hiring, contracting, and admissions.

Dr. Arnn is on the board of directors of The Heritage Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Center of Claremont McKenna College, the Philadelphia Society, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Claremont Institute. He served on the U.S. Army War College Board of Visitors for two years, for which he earned the Department of the Army’s “Outstanding Civilian Service Medal.” In 2015, he received the Bradley Prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

Dr. Arnn is the author of three books: Liberty and Learning: The Evolution of American Education; The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It; and Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government.

Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. He writes regular columns for American Greatness, The Epoch Times, and The Spectator, US edition. Mr. Kimball lectures widely and has appeared on national radio and television programs as well as the BBC. 

Mr. Kimball is the author of  The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse, and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity. Other titles by Mr. Kimball include The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America and Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age. Mr. Kimball is also the author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. He has contributed to many publications here and abroad, including The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, The Public Interest, Commentary, The Spectator, The New York Times Book Review, The Sunday Telegraph, The National Interest, among others.

Mr. Kimball has served on the Board of Advisors of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, the Board of Visitors and Governors of St. John’s College, Annapolis and Santa Fe, and Transaction Publishers.  He currently serves on the board of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and is Chairman of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. He is the recipient of a Bradley Prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Thomas L. Phillips Career Achievement Award from the Fund for American Studies, both in 2019.

Ryan Williams is the President of the Claremont Institute. Prior to becoming president in 2017, Mr. Williams held positions at the Claremont Institute as Chief Operating Officer, Director of Programs, Director of Special Projects, Assistant Director of Programs, and Research Assistant. He has taught American politics and political philosophy as an adjunct professor at California State University, San Bernardino and Cal Poly Pomona. A 2004 Publius Fellow of the Claremont Institute, Mr. Williams holds a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Hillsdale College and an M.A. in Politics from Claremont Graduate University. A native of Southern California, he was born in Santa Monica before moving to Encinitas in north county San Diego. He is the Publisher of The American Mind. He now resides in Claremont with his family.

James R. Stoner, Jr. (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1987) is the Hermann Moyse, Jr. Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University, as well as the Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute. has teaching and research interests in political theory, English common law, and American constitutionalism. He is the author of Common-Law Liberty: Rethinking American Constitutionalism and Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism, as well as a number of articles and essays. In 2009 he was named a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. He is the 2010 recipient of the Honors College Sternberg Professorship at LSU.

Michael Munger is a Professor of Political Science, and Director of the PPE Certificate Program at Duke University. His primary research focus is on the functioning of markets, regulation, and government institutions. He has taught at Dartmouth College, University of Texas, and University of North Carolina (where he was Director of the Master of Public Administration Program), as well as working as a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission during the Reagan Administration.

Munger is a past President of the Public Choice Society, an international academic society of political scientists and economists with members in 16 countries. He was North American Editor of the journal Public Choice for five years, and is now a Co-Editor of The Independent Review. His recent books include Choosing in Groups and Tomorrow 3.0. Munger’s most recent book, The Sharing Economy, was published in 2021 by the Institute for Economic Affairs.

Walter A. McDougall is Professor of History and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. A graduate of Amherst College and a Vietnam veteran, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1974 and taught at U.C. Berkeley for 13 years before coming to Penn to direct its International Relations Program which now has 180 majors.

McDougall teaches U.S., European, and Asia/Pacific diplomatic history and is the author of many books, most recently The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829–1877, and Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828. His other books include Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776, Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur, and …the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. McDougall is also Director of Research and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Jennifer Frey is the inaugural dean of the Honors College at The University of Tulsa and professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy & Religion. She is a faculty fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and a Newbigin Interfaith Fellow with The Carver Project. Prior to coming to Tulsa, she was an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, and prior to that, a collegiate assistant professor of the humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society for the Liberal Arts. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in philosophy and medieval studies (with a classics minor) at Indiana University-Bloomington.

Frey’s academic research is primarily on topics of moral psychology and virtue. In 2015, she was awarded a multi-million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation, titled “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life.” She frequently writes essays and book reviews for publications including First Things, Image, The Point, and the Wall Street Journal. She hosts a philosophy, theology, and literature podcast called “Sacred and Profane Love.”

Mark Bauerlein is Professor Emeritus in English at Emory University. He earned his doctorate in English at UCLA in 1988, and taught at Emory from 1989-2018, with a two-and-a-half-year break in 2003-05 to serve as the Director, Office of Research and Analysis, at the National Endowment for the Arts.

Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and Chronicle of Higher Education. His latest book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 was published in May 2008. The follow-up book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youths to Dangerous Adults, was released in 2022. He has co-edited a collection of essays entitled The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism, published in 2015.

Yoram Hazony is an Israeli philosopher, Bible scholar and political theorist. He is the Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, and serves as the President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem. His book, The Virtue of Nationalism, won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Conservative Book of the Year Award in 2019. His latest book is Conservatism: A Rediscovery. 

Pete Peterson is the Dean of the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. He is a leading national speaker and writer on issues related to civic participation, and the use of technology to make government more responsive and transparent. He was the first executive director of the bi-partisan organization, Common Sense California, which in 2010 joined with the Davenport Institute at the School of Public Policy to become the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership.

Peterson has co-created and currently co-facilitates the training seminar, “Public Engagement: The Vital Leadership Skill in Difficult Times” a program that has been attended by over 4,500 municipal officials, and he also helped to develop the program, “Leading Smart Communities,” which explores the ways in which technology is changing local government processes. Peterson has served as the chair of the Governance Committee for the Public Interest Technology-University Network.

In 2017, SPP launched a new initiative titled the “American Project: On the Future of Conservatism”, which is co-directed by Dean Peterson and Rich Tafel. The “Project” is a unique effort to gather scholars and activists from a variety points on the conservative spectrum to deliberate over, write about, and discuss the future of the conservative movement. In 2022, through a $10 million endowment gift, the “Project” transitioned into the academic center, Meese Institute for Liberty and the American Project.

Peterson writes widely on public engagement for a variety major news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle, as well as numerous blogs. He contributed the chapter, “Place As Pragmatic Policy” to the edited volume, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America, and the chapter “Do-It Ourselves Citizenship” in the volume, Localism in the Mass Age .

Peterson has been a public affairs fellow at The Hoover Institution, and he serves on the Leadership Council of the bipartisan nonprofit, California Forward, on the National Advisory Council for the Ashbrook Center, as well as on the Scholars Council for Braver Angels. Peterson has served as a member of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, which is organized by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, as well as the nonprofit, Sophos Africa.

Peterson was the Republican candidate for California Secretary of State in 2014.

Khalil Habib is Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, where he teaches political philosophy and American political thought. Dr. Habib has co-edited two books, The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom, and Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Globalization: Citizens Without States.

Nathan Pinkoski is an Assistant Professor of the Humanities at the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center. Before beginning at the Hamilton Center, Pinkoski was a research fellow and director of Academic Programs at the Zephyr Institute, an independent academic center in Palo Alto, California, dedicated to serving Stanford students, scholars, and young professionals. His research and teaching cover 20th century political thought, early modern political thought, and classical political thought.  He has published in a variety of academic and popular journals, including  First Things, Perspectives on Political Science, and The Review of Politics. He holds a BA (Hon) from the University of Alberta and an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in Politics from the University of Oxford. He has held research fellowships and lectureships at Princeton University and the University of Toronto. He recently co-edited  Augustine in a Time of Crisis  and translated  Alasdair Macintyre: An Intellectual Biography (Alasdair Macintyre: Une Biographie Intellectuelle) by Émile Perreau-Saussine. He is finishing a book called Political Philosophy and the Pursuit of Wisdom: Arendt, Strauss, MacIntyre.