Aaron Herold is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at SUNY Geneseo, where he is also the coordinator of Legal Studies and the co-director of the Forum on Constitutionalism and Democracy. He teaches courses on ancient and modern political philosophy, as well as on American constitutional law and judicial politics. His research focuses on the American constitutional tradition, the political philosophy of the liberal Enlightenment, and the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville—especially as these pertain to questions about the public role of religion and the separation of church and state.

He is the author of The Democratic Soul: Spinoza, Tocqueville, and Enlightenment Theology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), and his work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Research Quarterly, The Review of Politics, and Perspectives on Political Science. While at Princeton, he will be working on a second book examining the ascendancy of revolutionary thinking—the idea that social and political institutions should be evaluated, reformed, and perhaps even remade from whole cloth, without regard for existing customs and institutions—in modern democracy.

Aaron has held faculty positions at Boston College, Rhodes College, the University of Richmond, and the College of the Holy Cross. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. from the University of Toronto, and a B.A. from Emory University.