Susan McWilliams Barndt

Susan McWilliams Barndt is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Political Philosophy and American Constitutionalism at Claremont McKenna College.

McWilliams is the author of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (Lexington, 2018) and Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory (Oxford, 2014), and the co-author of America’s Political Philosopher: Mark Twain and the Character of Democracy (with Wilson Carey McWilliams, Notre Dame, forthcoming). She is also the editor of A Political Companion to James Baldwin (Kentucky, 2017) and a co-editor of several books, including The Best Kind of College: An Insiders’ Guide to America’s Small Liberal Arts Colleges (with John Seery, SUNY, 2015) and The Princeton History of American Political Thought (with Nicholas Buccola and Roosevelt Montás, Princeton, forthcoming).

McWilliams serves as the President/Chair of the American Political Thought section of the American Political Science Association and the co-editor of the American Political Thought book series at the University Press of Kansas. She is a past editor of the peer-reviewed journal American Political Thought. Her writing has appeared in both scholarly and popular journals, and she has been a media commentator on American politics for outlets such as The Atlantic, Business Insider, KPCC’s AirTalk, LiveNOW From FOX, The Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, Newsweek, Pacifica Radio, Politico, the Tavis Smiley Show, and “Today in LA” on KNBC.

For her work, McWilliams has received accolades including the Graves Award in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the Jack Miller Center’s Teaching Excellence Award in Higher Education. Before coming to CMC, McWilliams was on the faculty at Pomona College, where she won the Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching four times. 

McWilliams holds a B.A. in political science and Russian from Amherst College, an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University, and a Certificate in Advanced Educational Leadership from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Research interests:
Political Theory
History of Political Thought
American Political Thought
Politics and Literature
Civic Education
Liberal Arts Education