ISI’s Honors Program 2024

Patrick J. Deneen holds a B.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University.  From 1995-1997 he was Speechwriter and Special Advisor to the Director of the United States Information Agency.  From 1997-2005 he was Assistant Professor of Government at Princeton University.  From 2005-2012 he was Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, before joining the faculty of Notre Dame in Fall 2012.  He is the author and editor of several books and numerous articles and reviews and has delivered invited lectures around the world.

Deneen was awarded the A.P.S.A.’s Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Theory in 1995, and an honorable mention for the A.P.S.A.’s Best First Book Award in 2000.  He has been awarded research fellowships from Princeton University, Earhart Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Virginia.

His teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought, American political thought, liberalism, conservatism, and constitutionalism.   

Dr. Khalil M Habib is Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, where he teaches political philosophy and American political thought. Dr. Habib has co-edited two books, The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom, and Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Globalization: Citizens Without States.

Susan Hanssen is an Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Dallas. She received her graduate degree in history from Rice University in Houston, TX. She received her undergraduate degree in history from Boston University (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa). During the summer of 2008 she was adjunct professor for the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation at Georgetown University. She was the 2010-2011 Garwood Fellow at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

Enrique Pallares is a political theorist who specializes in the history of ideas, modernity, liberalism, continental philosophy, ideology and totalitarianism, and the relationship between transcendence and the symbolic articulations of order in history. He holds a B.A. in Literature and Philosophy from The New School University in New York and a Ph.D. in Political Theory from The Catholic University of America, where he has taught in the Politics Department and in the School of Philosophy. Dr. Pallares is finishing a book manuscript on the concept of the person in modernity, with a particular focus on the work of Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, and is working on a book project on the political philosophy of the Spanish liberal tradition. He is a Fellow at the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Washington College and a Visiting Scholar at The Catholic University of America. He is originally from Ecuador, has lived in Argentina and Spain, and is the co-founder of Casa Carmen—a farm, winery, and vermouth producer in the Brandywine Valley of Pennsylvania, where he lives with his family.

Joseph Prud’homme is the Burton Family Chair in Religion, Politics, and Culture and Associate Professor of Political Science and Affiliated Faculty member in Religious Studies. Professor Prud’homme is the founding Director of the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Washington College. He received his doctorate from Princeton University, where he studied in the Interdepartmental Program in Political Philosophy, with additional specialization in constitutional law and religious studies. He was awarded a Fellowship at Harvard University, where he studied at the Harvard Law School and served as a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He has also held a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford.

Professor Prud’homme works in the areas of political philosophy, legal theory, intellectual history and religious studies. He has published numerous works in these fields, including the books Religion and Politics in America from the Colonial Period to the Civil War; Curriculum and the Culture Wars: Debating the Bible’s Place in Public Schools (with Melissa Deckman of Washington College); State Religious Education and the State of Religious Life (with Liam Gearon of the University of Oxford); the chapter on Religion and Education for the Palgrave Handbook on Religion and the State; and numerous peer-reviewed articles.

He teaches political theory, constitutional law, and Western religious traditions. He earned two bachelor’s degrees with three majors and a minor at Texas A&M University, where he graduated magna cum laude and with an honors certificate. He directs a partnership between Washington College and the University of Oxford. He is also a frequent guest lecturer.

Born and raised in Colorado, Dr. Westblade reached Michigan by way of an educational path through Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut, plus a two-year sojourn in Germany and France for language study. He met his South Dakota wife, Joni, in Denver and they married in 1983. They have three married children and two grandchildren, who live in Illinois, Virginia, and Minnesota. Dr. Westblade has taught courses in Early Christianity and Bible at Hillsdale since 1988. He was ordained in the Baptist General Conference (now Converge) in 2005. Outside oh his professional, academic life he is invested in the ministries of Young Life, InterVarsity, and College Baptist Church. He plays racquetball at least twice every week and loves to ski and travel. Turkey and Uganda stand out among his most beautiful and frequent international destinations.

Dr. Benedict Whalen is Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale College. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Dallas, and went on to study at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he received his master’s degree and his Ph.D. Dr. Whalen taught at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, before coming to Hillsdale College in 2014.

While a true generalist at heart, Dr. Whalen specializes in Renaissance British Literature, including the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and the lyric poetry of the period. He has published several articles on the works of Shakespeare, Donne, and Renaissance drama and has edited a volume of the poetry of the English martyrs titled Lyra Martyrum. He has served as the Book Review Editor for the Ben Jonson Journal since 2008. He was honored as Hillsdale College Professor of the Year in 2020.

Dr. Whalen lives in Hillsdale with his wife Lisa and their six children.

Andrew Willard Jones holds a PhD in Medieval History from Saint Louis University with a focus on the Church of the High Middle Ages. Jones’s work is primarily concerned with historical political theology and with the reconciliation of the post-modern with the pre-modern. Methodologically, his work treats history as a theological discipline and not as a secular archaeology. Jones is the author of Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in St. Louis IX’s Sacramental Kingdom and the one-volume history of the Catholic Church The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. He is also working on an overview of the Church’s social teaching.

Father John Strickland is a priest of the Orthodox Church of America and the rector of Saint Elizabeth parish in Poulsbo, Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in European history and has taught at several universities over the course of a quarter-century. His specialization is Russia, and his first book is entitled The Making of Holy Russia: The Orthodox Church and Russian Nationalism before the Revolution. Long interested in the influence of Christianity on the West, he recently completed a four-volume history entitled Paradise and Utopia: The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was. This series tells the story—from Pentecost to the present—of “Christendom,” which Fr. John defines not as the Church as such but as “a civilization with a supporting culture that directs its members toward the heavenly transformation of the world.” The work’s goal was to tell the story of the West from the perspective of the Christian East, a perspective almost totally unknown in America’s conventional scholarship and media.

In addition to his pastoral and scholarly work, Fr. John enjoys woodworking and writing fiction, with a current project set in post-Communist Saint Petersburg influenced by Dostoevsky and (less conventionally) Arthurian legend. He lives in rural western Puget Sound with his wife Yelena (who works as a psychotherapist) and five children.