Each year the Program invites scholars with established records as well as scholars who have recently received their doctorates to apply for appointments as Visiting Fellows, Associate Research Scholars, and Postdoctoral Research Associates. Scholars in the James Madison Program pursue their own research and writing, participate in courses, seminars and colloquia, and contribute to the intellectual life of the Department of Politics and Princeton University.
Current Visiting Fellows
Nicholas Anderson conducts research on liberal political theory, German Idealism, and the history of political philosophy. His dissertation, “Dreaming that Sweet Dream: A Study of Kant’s Anthropology of Hope,” examines Immanuel Kant’s philosophical and anthropological justification of liberalism. Nicholas has received the Aristotle Prize from the Metaphysical Society of America and the Robert C. Wood Prize from the New England Political Science Association for papers based on two different chapters of his dissertation. While at Princeton, Nicholas will work on converting his dissertation into a book manuscript. In addition, he will work on a shorter study of the political and aesthetic thought of Albert Murray, a study that connects many of the themes of his dissertation to American thought and politics. These two projects take up the central role of hope in political life.
Nicholas earned a PhD in Political Science from Boston College and a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Santa Fe.
Steele Brand is an associate professor of History in the PPE Program at The King’s College. He teaches courses in history and political thought, spanning from the ancient Near East to the early modern period. He also taught military history classes at the University of Texas-Austin and is a former U.S. Army tactical intelligence officer. Brand received his PhD from Baylor University and his Master's in Theology from Southwestern Seminary.
Brand’s publications focus on republicanism, citizen armies, and statesmanship. His first book, Killing for the Republic: Citizen-Soldiers and the Roman Way of War, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press (2019). He has published articles in journals such as Humanitas and Religions. Interviews and popular versions of his work have appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill, Fox News, and Time, among others. While on fellowship with the James Madison program, he will be completing a manuscript on the theory and early exemplars of Christian statesmanship.
Timothy W. Burns is a professor of political science and graduate program director at Baylor University. His research interests include the history of political thought from Homer to Strauss, politics and literature, and liberal education. His most recent book is Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education. He is also the author of Shakespeare’s Political Wisdom, co-author (with Thomas L. Pangle) of Introduction to Political Philosophy, editor of Brill’s Companion to Leo Strauss’ Writings on Classical Political Thought, co-editor (with Peter Lawler) of The Future of Liberal Education, co-editor (with Bryan-Paul Frost) of Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Re-examining the Debate Between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, editor of Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle, and editor of After History? Francis Fukuyama and his Critics. He has published in The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Interpretation, The Review of Politics, The Review of Metaphysics, Perspectives on Political Science, Polis, Logos, The Political Science Reviewer, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, and First Things. He co-edits (with Thomas L. Pangle) Palgrave MacMillan’s “Recovering Political Philosophy” series, and he is Editor-in-Chief of Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. He has taught at Hiram College, Texas State, Boston College, and Skidmore College. During his fellowship with the James Madison Program, he will be completing a book on Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.
Timothy received an MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto and a BA in Political Science from Boston College.
Keegan Callanan is an associate professor of political science at Middlebury College, where he teaches the history of political philosophy and contemporary political theory. His primary research is in modern political thought, democratic theory, and the origins of American institutions. He is author of Montesquieu's Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics (Cambridge, 2018) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Montesquieu (under contract, Cambridge). His current research focuses on Alexis de Tocqueville and liberal political theory. His writing has appeared in publications such as History of Political Thought, Political Research Quarterly, and the Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Callanan has held visiting fellowships at Princeton University's James Madison Program and at the University of Virginia. He is founding director of the Alexander Hamilton Forum at Middlebury and a member of the National Council on the Humanities. A graduate of Bowdoin College, Mr. Callanan received his MA and PhD from Duke University.
Alexis Carré teaches political philosophy as an adjunct lecturer at several French universities including Sciences Po Paris and Sciences Po Lille. He obtained his PhD in Philosophy under the supervision of Jean-Claude Monod at the École Normale Supérieure – PSL in Paris and his Master’s Degree in Political Studies at the EHESS under the supervision of Pierre Manent. His dissertation, entitled “War and Law: The Refounding of Liberalism Against the Conservative Revolution in Leo Strauss and Raymond Aron,” is at the intersection of such fields as political philosophy, law, and international relations. Through a parallel reading of Raymond Aron, Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, the chief concern of his research is to explore how the confrontation of Modern and Ancient political rationalism may inform the way liberal democracy interacts with the reality of conflict, of which war is the extreme form. Besides academic scholarship, the nature of his research has led him to intervene as a political commentator in various outlets, including the Figaro, Quillette and the National Review.
Shawn Phillip Cooper is the Vice-President of the International Courtly Literature Society's North American Branch, and he is on the advisory board of the journal Encomia. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of English at Rochester University and Full-Time Faculty at Oakland Community College, where he taught until 2022. He studied History and English at Oakland University, before beginning graduate studies in the English department at the same institution, writing a thesis titled "Loyalty to Leviathan: Andrew Marvell's Politics in the Cromwellian Poems." He accepted a Thomas C. Rumble fellowship to study mediæval English Literary and Cultural Studies at Wayne State University, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation titled "Chivalry and Governance in Malory's Le Morte Darthur and Tennyson's Idylls of the King."
Dr. Cooper's scholarship centres on the relationship between political philosophy and culture, and his work focuses on the complex interplay between political theory, cultural practises, and literary depictions of polities. He has presented and organised many panels at the International Congress on Mediæval Studies, and he has a chapter entitled "The Decline of Chivalry: Performative Courtliness in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur" in Courtly Pastimes (Routledge, 2022) edited by Gloria Allaire and Julie Human. At Princeton, he is working on a manuscript addressing how an emerging Hobbesian state of nature in the American Constituional order may be addressed by a Common Good administrative state constrained within the framework of Madisonian Democracy.
Agata Czarnecka is an assistant professor of law at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. She teaches courses in jurisprudence, theory of law, sociology of law, and logic. Her primary research is in contemporary political philosophy and constitutional law. In her doctoral dissertation “The New Natural Law Theory and Contemporary Legal and Ethical Problems” she analyzed the revived theory of natural law and demonstrated its argumentative usefulness within public philosophy. She is the author of many articles about contemporary ethical and social problems from the perspective of the philosophy of law, concerning the issue of perfectionist dimension of law. While at Princeton, she will be working on a book about constitutionalism as a problem of legal and political philosophy.
She is a judicial clerk at the Constitutional Tribunal of the Republic of Poland. She received her MA in sociology and an MA and PhD in law from the Nicolaus Copernicus University.
Solveig Lucia Gold is the Thomas W. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, where she received her A.B. in Classics, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and was co-winner of the Moses Taylor Pyne Prize, the highest general distinction Princeton confers on an undergraduate. She recently successfully defended her PhD dissertation in Classics, titled Justice, Piety, and Slavery in Plato’s Thought, at the University of Cambridge, from which she also holds an MPhil with distinction. A native New Yorker, Solveig published her first academic article in Classical Quarterly; has published popular pieces in City Journal, First Things, the Free Press, the Human Life Review, the New Criterion, Quillette, and the Spectator World; was profiled in the New York Times; is regularly invited to address audiences on topics ranging from the Allegory of the Cave to academic freedom; and is co-author, with her grandfather, Robert W. Jenson, of Conversations with Poppi: An Eight-Year-Old and Her Theologian Grandfather Trade Questions, published by Brazos Press and subsequently translated into Korean, Mandarin, and Arabic.
Mark David Hall is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics at George Fox University. He is also Associated Faculty at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, a Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and a Visiting Scholar at the Mercatus Center. His research focuses on American political thought and religious liberty/church-state relations in the United States. Mark earned a BA in political science from Wheaton College (IL) and a PhD in Government from the University of Virginia. He has written, edited, or co-edited a dozen books, including Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land: How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans (Fidelis Publishing, forthcoming). During his fellowship, he will co-author a book on Christian nationalism in the United States.
James Hankins is a professor of history at Harvard University and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. He is the author, editor or translator of 30 books and some 200 articles on Renaissance philosophy, humanism, and political thought. His Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University in 2019, won the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association in 2020, and was named Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year in 2020. It has been translated into Italian and is currently being translated into Chinese.
Hankins is a Corresponding Member of the British Academy and was awarded the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award by the Renaissance Society of America. He also writes opinion pieces and long-form essays for the Wall Street Journal, First Things, American Affairs, The New Criterion, Law and Liberty, Public Discourse, and The Claremont Review of Books. A new book, Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy will be published by Harvard University Press in early 2023.
Thomas D. Howes holds a PhD in philosophy at Catholic University of America, and his work engages in contemporary ethical and political debates from a standpoint of contemporary natural law theory and from a tradition of Thomistic virtue ethics. While at the Madison Program he will be working on incorporating part of his dissertation, which was a political-ethical defense of religious liberty, into a book manuscript about political ethics informed by contemporary natural law theory.
Nasser Hussain is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University. A graduate of Harvard College, where he majored in government, Nasser received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. At Princeton, he also serves as a Faculty Fellow at Yeh College and the Bloomberg Center for Access & Opportunity.
Nasser's doctoral dissertation, an immigration epic, engaged Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics in exploring the connection between faith and work in the building of a religious community. In this multigenerational research on identity and belonging, he examines the evolving ways in which immigrants and their offspring conceive of the good life as they encounter normative conceptions of mobility and success. His broader research lies at the intersection of religion, ethics and politics.
Nasser’s wide-ranging scholarly endeavors have received notable awards and distinctions. The Volvo Research & Educational Foundation sponsored his project on the disruptive potential of technology in the American urban landscape, especially in relation to community life, mobility and access. At Harvard, he received a South Asia Initiative research award for his study on social movements, while at Columbia his teaching excellence was acknowledged through a Kluge fellowship. He has received numerous research fellowships as a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, the Earth Institute, the Kennedy School of Government and Chatham House, where he published a report on the politics of the European Union. A frequent contributor on topical issues in public discourse, his writings have appeared in a truly diverse array of publications, including First Things, The Guardian, Public Discourse, RealClearPolitics and the San Antonio Express-News.
Beyond these academic pursuits, Nasser has worked in the British Parliament, a major international newspaper and a Fortune 500 company. A passionate educator, he has taught and mentored students across three continents. At Princeton, Nasser teaches his acclaimed freshman seminar, American Identity at a Crossroads? The course covers the most salient debates in contemporary American culture.
Stefan Kolev is the Academic Director of the Ludwig Erhard Forum for Economy and Society in Berlin and a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Applied Sciences Zwickau, Germany.
His research focuses on the history of economic thought, especially ordoliberalism, Austrian economics and the German historical school, as well as the applicability of historical insights on the politico-economic problems in today’s Western democracies. He has written extensively on the history of constitutional and institutional economics as well as the notion of neoliberalism in mid-20th-century political economy. More recently he explores the genealogy of ordoliberalism in 19th-century German economic thought, especially in the tradition of the German Historical School and the economic sociology of Max Weber. He is co-editor of the ORDO Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and of the Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch. He spent his earlier sabbatical semesters at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University and at the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University Bloomington. While at Princeton, he will be working on a biography of Austrian economist and social philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek, as well as on the history of social policy in German economic thought as a tool to pacify polarized societies.
Stefan received his diplomas in Economics and Business Administration as well as his PhD in Economics from the University of Hamburg.
Juan Tello Mendoza is a lecturer of Constitutional Law at the University of Barcelona, and a member of the Study Group on Democracy and Constitutionalism at the University of Barcelona. His doctoral dissertation critically explored the "conventionality control" as a doctrine created and used by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. While at Princeton, he will focus on the Rule of Law and the determination of fundamental rights to explore which branch (judicial or legislative) must have the pre-eminence of that duty.
Juan holds a PhD in Constitutional Law from the University of Barcelona, an LLM in Human Rights from the University of Navarra, and an LLB from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
Rosemarie Monge is an associate professor in the Department of Ethics and Business Law at St. Thomas University in Minnesota. Her expertise and instruction centers on themes surrounding business ethics, role of business in society, corporate social responsibility. Professor Monge has a PhD in Ethics and Legal Studies from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
She is the recipient of Best Practical Solutions Award 2022 from the Society for Business Ethics Annual Conference for the conference paper, “Everyday Business Ethics.” The paper pushes back against the idea that the market sphere is more permissive than everyday life and argues for greater emphasis on the role of everyday morality and mid-level theorizing in business ethics. At the Madison Program Professor Monge will work on articles that aim to flesh out the Everyday Business Ethics approach, including its application to the Robinhood Markets, Inc.’s 2021 scandal, its implications for the debate surrounding market commodification, and the role of markets in the approach.
Ronen Shoval is the Dean of Tikvah Fund, Head of Argaman Institute and Director of the Theodor Herzl Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Culture, and Jewish political thought at the Argaman Institute, Israel. He has also taught at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and has been a research associate at the Institute for Zionist Strategies and Herzl institute.
Ronen holds a BA in international relations and an MA in Jewish Philosophy from the Hebrew University. He earned a PhD in Jewish political thought from the Paris West University Nanterre La Défense. He is the author of Herzl Vision 2.0 (Rubin Mass, 2010) and the winner of Begin Center Award for Outstanding Academic Research. During his fellowship with the James Madison Program, he will study the characteristics of the epistemological assumptions underlying the conservative worldview. Dr. Shoval is a Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University.
Abby Staysa is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Politics at Princeton University. Her current research is about the significance of pleasure and pain in Aristotle’s philosophy of education and political science. Whereas the liberal political tradition imagines pleasure and pain as instrumental for fostering a political regime in which individuals are free without interference to shape their own lives, Aristotle contends that citizens must be trained to derive pleasure from the activities that accord with virtue. Illuminating the deep differences that mark the two perspectives, this project examines how regimes and political life differ given the different understandings of the place of pleasure and pain in our education.
Abby received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame and a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from Hiram College.
Ján Tomastík, born in Slovakia, is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. His dissertation in the field of political philosophy will be a defense of the following thesis: Political authority has a real but limited (subsidiary) role in fostering a good moral environment. Ján's essay on this topic, "Moral Ecology and Politics," was recognized in the CREATE Prize 2021 and published by Angelicum University Press in Human Flourishing: Reflections from Catholic Tradition in Central Europe. While a Visiting Student Research Collaborator at the James Madison Program, he will work on article drafts he recently presented at the Veritas Conference at Providence College ("Public Reasons without Liberalism") and at Christian Philosophy and its Challenges in Krakow, Poland ("Political Perfectionism as a Matter of Justice").
Ján earned both his BA and MA (Political Science) at Masaryk University. He completed two semester-long study visits at University of Vienna and University of Ljubljana, and studied liberal arts at the Collegium of Anton Neuwirth in Slovakia. He was awarded the Veritas Scholarship with ADF International in Vienna, where he worked for a year, and then spent two years as an advisor at the Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs and Family of the Slovak Republic.
Geoffrey M. Vaughan is professor of political science at Assumption University in Worcester, MA. He has held teaching or research positions at Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard Universities and taught at The University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) for ten years before coming to Assumption in 2008. His published works include Behemoth Teaches Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Political Education (2002) and Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers (2018), as well as many articles and book chapters on the history of political philosophy from Hobbes to Habermas. He has also published on topics such as international relations, higher education policy, and American politics in The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Review, and the Toronto Globe & Mail, among other venues. A chapter on the natural law in the tales of Sherlock Holmes will be published in a forthcoming volume from Ignatius Press. While a Madison Fellow, he will be completing a book on the role of the philosopher-king in modern political thought. A personal, but also scholarly project, will include the completion of a manuscript left to him by his late father, Frederick Vaughan, on Progressivism in Canadian Constitutional Law.