Jeffrey Tulis

Jeffrey K. Tulis is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Texas at Austin in the College of Liberal Arts. He joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 1988 as a senior member of the Government Department. In recent years, he served as Professor of Government in the College of Liberal Arts, his primary appointment, and also as Professor of Law in the School of Law, and Professor of Communication Studies in the Moody College of Communication.

Professor Tulis’s interests bridge the fields of political theory, American politics and public law, including more specifically, American political development, constitutional theory, political philosophy and the American presidency. His publications include The Presidency in the Constitutional Order (LSU, 1981; Transaction/Routledge, 2010), The Constitutional Presidency (Johns Hopkins, 2009), The Limits of Constitutional Democracy (Princeton, 2010), and The Rhetorical Presidency, (Princeton, 1987, new edition, 2017).

Four collections of essays on The Rhetorical Presidency with responses by Tulis have been published, including a special double issue of Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Society, (2007), where his book is described as “one of the two or three most important and perceptive works written by a political scientist in the twentieth century.” In 2017 it was chosen for the Princeton Classics collection of affordable new editions of “some of the most important and influential books ever published by Princeton University Press—works by leading scholars and writers that have made a lasting impact on intellectual life around the world.” It received the American Political Science Association’s Legacy Award in 2018. 

His most recent book (co-authored with Nicole Mellow) is Legacies of Losing in American Politics (Chicago, 2018). Two symposiums on this book have been published — in the LSE USAPP American Politics and Policy Blog in 2019, and in the journal Political Theory in 2020. Since 2016, Tulis has been regularly writing for the public sphere, including essays and articles in: The Atlantic, Washington Post, The Bulwark, Public Seminar, The Constitutionalist, American Purpose, The Unpopulist, Democracy Seminar, and the LSE American Politics and Policy Blog.

He has held research fellowships from NEH, ACLS, Olin Foundation, Harvard Law School, and the Mellon Preceptorship at Princeton University, where he taught before moving to Texas. He has held visiting positions at Notre Dame and Harvard.  During the academic year 2008-09, he was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. During Spring 2016, he was a Dahrendorf Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Research interests:
Political Theory
American Politics
Public Law