Executive Committee

Chairman, James W. Ceaser is Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1976. He has written several books on American politics and political thought, including Presidential Selection, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, Reconstructing America, and Nature and History in American Political Development. Professor Ceaser has held visiting professorships at the University of Florence, the University of Basel, Oxford University, the University of Bordeaux, and the University of Rennes. Professor He is a frequent contributor to the popular press, and he often comments on American Politics for the Voice of America. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at Harvard University in 1976.

Professor Ceaser is the founder and director of The Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy at UVA (http://faculty.virginia.edu/pcd-at-uva/index.htm).The PCD supports two fellows each year to serve in residence at the University of Virginia to pursue their own advanced research. Fellows are recruited among those who have just finished or who are about to complete their doctoral dissertations. In addition, PCD has helped on occasion to support advanced scholars on sabbatical leave who wish to be at the University of Virginia in order to pursue their research. The PCD also offers undergraduate instruction in small seminars on courses related to the American Political Tradition. Approximately 150 undergraduates each year are enrolled in this program. With assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities during the year 2006-2007, PCD developed two syllabi that it shared with other university departments or institutes. And the PCD sponsors a series of ten lectures and seminars each year by invited speakers from outside the university. Each speaker conducts a class within the introductory course on the American Political Tradition, addressing a topic that is part of the regular syllabus. Speakers also meet with a group of graduate students and faculty to discuss an advanced topic of their own research. The Jack Miller Center supports The Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy.

Vice Chairman, Wilfred M. McClay has been SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he is also Professor of History, since 1999. He has also taught at Georgetown University, Tulane University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Dallas, and is currently a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Society of Scholars at the James Madison Program of Princeton University. He was appointed in 2002 to the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (North Carolina, 1994), which won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history published in the years 1993 and 1994. Among his other books are The Student's Guide to U.S. History (2001), Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in Modern America (2003), Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (2007), and a forthcoming collection of essays entitled The Burden of the Humanities. He was educated at St. John's College (Annapolis) and the Johns Hopkins University, where he received a Ph.D. in history in 1987.

Vice Chairman Robert Koons is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, where he has been since he earned his doctorate from UCLA in 1987. Koons earned First Class Honours at Oxford and has been a Danforth and a Richard M. Weaver Fellow. His research has been in the areas of philosophical logic, metaphysics, epistemology and the foundations of ethics and political theory. He has published two books: Paradoxes of Belief and Strategic Rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1992), for which he received the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools, and Realism Regained: An Exact Theory of Causation, Teleology and the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2000). He is currently working on the logic of causation and the metaphysics of life and the mind.

Professor Koons is the founder and director of The Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions (http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/westernciv/) which offers an interdisciplinary concentration, courses and events designed to help undergraduate students at UT to craft a course of study that exposes them to the very best that has been thought and written within the great tradition that links us with the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews, the riches of medieval and Renaissance European culture, and the founding of the American Republic. Forty professors from a dozen departments have affiliated with the program, including many of the most distinguished scholars and teachers at UT. The Program provides students with the opportunity to earn a concentration in Western Civilization and American Institutions by completing eighteen hours from an approved list of courses, drawn from Government, Philosophy, Classics, English, History, and other departments. Starting in the fall of 2008, the Program will begin offering its own courses: interdisciplinary seminars in the Great Books of the Western tradition, enabling students to trace the evolution of the ideas that make the American system unique: the rule of law, individual liberty, the free market, the freedom of intellectual inquiry. The Jack Miller Center supports The Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions.

Members

Senior Fellow Mark Bauerlein will serve as editor of the Jack Miller Center blog. Dr. Bauerlein is Professor of English at Emory University and Mark Bauerlein earned his doctorate in English at UCLA in 1988. He has taught at Emory since 1989, 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, Weekly Standard, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, and Chronicle of Higher Education, where he is also a featured blogger.

Professor Bauerlein, is the founder and director of The Program in Democracy and Citizenship (http://emorydemcit.org/about.html) at Emory University. The program aims to address the problem of declining civic, historical, and cultural knowledge among college-age students. At present, it is a coordinated effort involving five departments'English, History, Philosophy, Linguistics, and Classics. The departments offer American tradition-oriented courses, and the Program provides funding and curricular support. Each semester, department officers and the Program Director develop general education courses whose readings and course work center on enduring civic and cultural traditions of the United States. Departments assume the role of submitting course descriptions and readings, as well as personnel recommendations. The Program Director advises the teachers on syllabus design in order to match the courses to the educational aims of the Program. Each course fulfills a general education requirement. Additionally, each course has at least one guest presentation per semester. The speakers come mainly from the public world (journalism, foundations, think tanks). Each visit spans one or two days, with the speaker presenting assigned texts to classes and meeting students in private conferences to discuss issues. The Jack Miller Center supports The Program in Democracy and Citizenship.

Senior Fellow Patrick Deneen is the inaugural holder of the Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair of Hellenic Studies in the Department of Government. He is the author of two books - The Odyssey of Political Theory and Democratic Faith - and numerous articles and reviews. He has written on figures as various as Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Vico, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, John Dewey, G.K. Chesterton, Reinhold Niebuhr, Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and Wilson Carey McWilliams. His work has appeared in academic journals and journals of opinion, including Political Theory, Perspectives on Political Science, Polis, Modern Language Studies, Social Research, Commonweal, Society, First Things, The Weekly Standard, The Hedgehog Review, The Dallas Morning News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is currently at work on two book projects: "Another America: The Alternative Tradition in American Political Thought" and "The Idea of Division of Labor in the History of Western Political Thought." Deneen earned his Ph.D in Political Science at Rutgers University in 1995.

Professor Deneen is the founding director of The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy (http://government.georgetown.edu/tocquevilleforum/), an initiative housed in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, that seeks to advance the study of America's founding principles and their roots in the Western philosophical and religious traditions. Named for Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French observer of America, the Forum endeavors to emulate Tocqueville's sympathetic and penetrating exploration of the origins of and prospects for American constitutional democracy. Sponsoring events such as conferences, lectures and colloquia on the campus of Georgetown University, the Tocqueville Forum hopes to deepen classical liberal learning and elevate the civic understanding of the students of Georgetown University and the next generation of citizens and leaders. The Jack Miller Center supports The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy.