American Politics and Government Summit

Calendar
DATE
November 07-09, 2024
Location
LOCATION
Linda L. Bean Conference Center at ISI, Wilmington, DE

Calling All Faculty to Reassess Western Civilization

College professors are familiar with the unending calls to “deconstruct” Western civilization and reassess it in light of post-colonial studies, critical race theory, critical gender theory, and sexuality studies. American universities are constantly engaged in a referendum on our civilization and our way of life, and their verdict isn’t promising for the future of America. 

As academia partakes in the culture of repudiation, we see an opportunity to do our own reassessment of Western Civilization. What are the roots of American order? How do the sources of Western Civilization continue to inspire our current way of life? Where in our patrimony should we look for answers to our current challenges? And how can we best revitalize our heritage as we bring American greatness to new generations? 

Enter ISI’s second American Politics and Government Summit. Our theme, “The Golden Thread: Reassessing Western Civilization,” will be co-chaired by Allen Guelzo and James Hankins. The Summit will provide a place for professors across disciplines to have a serious academic dialogue about emerging research—rooted in timeless principles— in the fields of politics, philosophy, and economics. 

ISI’s Second APG Summit will take place from November 7-9, 2024 at ISI’s Linda L. Bean Center in Wilmington, DE. The deadline to submit abstracts for conference papers is March 30, 2024, and can be submitted below. Faculty attending the conference will be able to book their hotel rooms below.

Reach out to Tom Sarrouf at tsarrouf@isi.org with questions.

Faculty and graduate students can book their hotels using our special group rates at either the Homewood Suites By Hilton Wilmington Downtown, theHyatt Wilmington Downtown or the DoubleTree by Hilton hotels, and Homewood Suites Wilmington-Brandywine.

Become a Sponsor

Join ISI’s American Politics and Government Summit as a Gold or Silver sponsor!

Silver sponsors are invited to organize a panel during the summit. Gold sponsors are invited to organize a plenary lunchtime panel during the summit. Both Silver and Gold sponsors will be listed in the summit program and thanked from the podium.

Sponsorship opportunities are limited by the event schedule, so don’t delay in contributing to this great project of American renewal!

 

Conference Committee

Allen Guelzo (Co-Chair)

Allen C. Guelzo is a New York Times best-selling author, American historian, and commentator on public issues. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles TimesThe Wall Street JournalThe Weekly Standard,  National Review, and the Claremont Review of Books, amongst other publications and many media outlets. In 2018, he was a winner of the Bradley Prize, along with Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal and Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute.

He is Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar and Director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship. Previously, he was Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, and the Director of Civil War Era Studies, and the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College. During 2010-11 and again in 2017-18, he served as the  Garwood Visiting Professor in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He holds an MA and PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Among his many award-winning publications, he is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America; Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America; Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas; and Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (in the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introductions’ series). In 2012, he published Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and in 2013 Alfred Knopf published his book on the battle of Gettysburg, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. His most recent books are Redeeming the Great Emancipator; Reconstruction: A Concise History, and Robert E. Lee: A Life

James Hankins (Co-Chair)

James Hankins is an American intellectual historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance. He is the General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library and the Associate Editor of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum at Harvard University, where he is a professor in the History Department. In 2018, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. 

Hankins has been a Fulbright Scholar, a member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, a fellow and visiting professor at the Villa I Tatti, a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. In 2010, he was Carlyle Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford. In 2014, he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Hankins is the author or editor of over twenty volumes and more than eighty articles, including The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni; Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance; Marsilio Ficino: Platonic Theology; and more recently Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy; and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena. 

Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. He writes regular columns for American Greatness, The Epoch Times, and The Spectator, US edition. Mr. Kimball lectures widely and has appeared on national radio and television programs as well as the BBC. 

Mr. Kimball is the author of  The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of AmnesiaThe Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages ArtLives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse, and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity. Other titles by Mr. Kimball include The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America and Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age. Mr. Kimball is also the author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. He has contributed to many publications here and abroad, including The New CriterionThe Wall Street JournalThe Public InterestCommentaryThe SpectatorThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Sunday Telegraph, The National Interest, among others.

Mr. Kimball has served on the Board of Advisors of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, the Board of Visitors and Governors of St. John’s College, Annapolis and Santa Fe, and Transaction Publishers.  He currently serves on the board of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and is Chairman of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. He is the recipient of a Bradley Prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Thomas L. Phillips Career Achievement Award from the Fund for American Studies, both in 2019.

James Stoner, Jr.

James R. Stoner, Jr. (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1987) is the Hermann Moyse, Jr. Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University, as well as the Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute. has teaching and research interests in political theory, English common law, and American constitutionalism. He is the author of Common-Law Liberty: Rethinking American Constitutionalism and Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism, as well as a number of articles and essays. In 2009 he was named a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. He is the 2010 recipient of the Honors College Sternberg Professorship at LSU.

Michael Munger

Michael Munger is a Professor of Political Science, and Director of the PPE Certificate Program at Duke University. His primary research focus is on the functioning of markets, regulation, and government institutions. He has taught at Dartmouth College, University of Texas, and University of North Carolina (where he was Director of the Master of Public Administration Program), as well as working as a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission during the Reagan Administration.

Munger is a past President of the Public Choice Society, an international academic society of political scientists and economists with members in 16 countries. He was North American Editor of the journal Public Choice for five years, and is now a Co-Editor of The Independent Review. His recent books include Choosing in Groups and Tomorrow 3.0. Munger’s most recent book, The Sharing Economy, was published in 2021 by the Institute for Economic Affairs.

Walter McDougall

Walter A. McDougall is Professor of History and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. A graduate of Amherst College and a Vietnam veteran, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1974 and taught at U.C. Berkeley for 13 years before coming to Penn to direct its International Relations Program which now has 180 majors.

McDougall teaches U.S., European, and Asia/Pacific diplomatic history and is the author of many books, most recently The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National InterestThroes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829–1877, and Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828. His other books include Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776, Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur, and …the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. McDougall is also Director of Research and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Mark Bauerlein

Mark Bauerlein is Professor Emeritus in English at Emory University. He earned his doctorate in English at UCLA in 1988, and taught at Emory from 1989-2018, 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, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and Chronicle of Higher Education. His latest book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 was published in May 2008. The follow-up book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youths to Dangerous Adults, was released in 2022. He has co-edited a collection of essays entitled The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism, published in 2015.

Yoram Hazony

Yoram Hazony is an Israeli philosopher, Bible scholar and political theorist. He is the Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, and serves as the President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem. His book, The Virtue of Nationalism, won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Conservative Book of the Year Award in 2019. His latest book is Conservatism: A Rediscovery

Pete Peterson

Pete Peterson is the Dean of the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. He is a leading national speaker and writer on issues related to civic participation, and the use of technology to make government more responsive and transparent. He was the first executive director of the bi-partisan organization, Common Sense California, which in 2010 joined with the Davenport Institute at the School of Public Policy to become the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership.

Peterson has co-created and currently co-facilitates the training seminar, “Public Engagement: The Vital Leadership Skill in Difficult Times” a program that has been attended by over 4,500 municipal officials, and he also helped to develop the program, “Leading Smart Communities,” which explores the ways in which technology is changing local government processes. Peterson has served as the chair of the Governance Committee for the Public Interest Technology-University Network.

In 2017, SPP launched a new initiative titled the “American Project: On the Future of Conservatism”, which is co-directed by Dean Peterson and Rich Tafel. The “Project” is a unique effort to gather scholars and activists from a variety points on the conservative spectrum to deliberate over, write about, and discuss the future of the conservative movement. In 2022, through a $10 million endowment gift, the “Project” transitioned into the academic center, Meese Institute for Liberty and the American Project.

Peterson writes widely on public engagement for a variety major news outlets including the Wall Street JournalLos Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle, as well as numerous blogs. He contributed the chapter, “Place As Pragmatic Policy” to the edited volume, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America, and the chapter “Do-It Ourselves Citizenship” in the volume, Localism in the Mass Age .

Peterson has been a public affairs fellow at The Hoover Institution, and he serves on the Leadership Council of the bipartisan nonprofit, California Forward, on the National Advisory Council for the Ashbrook Center, as well as on the Scholars Council for Braver Angels. Peterson has served as a member of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, which is organized by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, as well as the nonprofit, Sophos Africa.

Peterson was the Republican candidate for California Secretary of State in 2014.

Nathan Pinkoski

Nathan Pinkoski is an Assistant Professor of the Humanities at the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center. Before beginning at the Hamilton Center, Pinkoski was a research fellow and director of Academic Programs at the Zephyr Institute, an independent academic center in Palo Alto, California, dedicated to serving Stanford students, scholars, and young professionals. His research and teaching cover 20th century political thought, early modern political thought, and classical political thought.  He has published in a variety of academic and popular journals, including  First Things, Perspectives on Political Science, and The Review of Politics. He holds a BA (Hon) from the University of Alberta and an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in Politics from the University of Oxford. He has held research fellowships and lectureships at Princeton University and the University of Toronto. He recently co-edited  Augustine in a Time of Crisis  and translated  Alasdair Macintyre: An Intellectual Biography (Alasdair Macintyre: Une Biographie Intellectuelle) by Émile Perreau-Saussine. He is finishing a book called Political Philosophy and the Pursuit of Wisdom: Arendt, Strauss, MacIntyre

Registration

 

Proposal Submission Requirement

In partnership with Encounter Books and their upcoming multi-volume history of Western Civilization by James Hankins (Harvard) and Allen Guelzo (Princeton), the APG Summit will accept paper and panel proposals related to the theme of tradition (or the Golden Thread) in Western Civilization.  

Tradition is fragile. If you have just one or two generations that neglect the tradition, the thread is broken. If manuscripts had not made it through the breakdown of traditions, the West would be very different: no Aristotle, no Plato, no Roman jurisprudence, many key texts of Greek and Roman literature and history would be lost. Yet, tradition is formative. The Romans built upon the tradition of the Greeks, the Christian tradition is built upon the Judaic, the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition fuse in Christian Rome. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome led to Philadelphia and shaped the American experiment.  

We invite proposals of scholarly papers and panels from across the disciplines as we explore The Golden Thread: Reassessing Western Civilization for the American Politics and Government Summit.

Graduate students whose proposals are accepted will be offered a $250 stipend to attend and present at the conference.

Examples of topics eligible for consideration include: 

  • Contingency and Determinism in History 
  • “The Argument from Heaven”: Reason as a Defining Factor in Civilization 
  • Monotheism as a Factor in the Establishment of Western Civilization 
  • Civil, Civility, Civilized: The Etymology of the Word ‘Civilization’ 
  • Clio Triumphans: Why does History Have a Muse? 
  • History and Culture 
  • From Inquiry to Narrative: Herodotus and Foucault and a Few Others 
  • Why Does the Revolution Not Need Historians? 
  • Irony and Order as Interpretations of Civilization 
  • Is the Enlightenment the Beginning, the Middle or the End of Western Civilization?

Proposals are due by March 30th, 2024.

Thank you for your interest.  

Please email Tom Sarrouf at tsarrouf@isi.org for more information. 

Submit your proposal

Submissions are due by March 30th, 2024