Land of Hope: A Weekend Conference for College Students

Patrick J. Deneen is the author of the widely discussed book Why Liberalism Failed, which has received praise from the likes of New York Times columnists Ross Douthat and David Brooks, the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher, and former president Barack Obama. Professor Deneen holds the David A. Potenziani Memorial Chair of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has also taught at Princeton and Georgetown.

Susan Hanssen is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Dallas.  She received her PhD in history from Rice University in Houston, Texas and her bachelor’s degree in history from Boston University (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa). During the summer of 2008 she served as an 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.

Jeff Polet is professor of political science at Hope College in Holland, MI. He is the author of works in American political thought, contemporary European political thought, religion and politics, and constitutional law. Dr. Polet helps direct the academic program for The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, and he recently served as editor of the popular website, Front Porch Republic. On the publishing side of late, he co-edited, with David K. Ryden, Documents Decoded: Church and State in America from ABC-CLIO. He doesn’t care too much for movies, but thinks that the music of Gustav Mahler is as close as human beings get to expressing the ineffable, that God listens to Mozart in his spare time, and that Bach is history’s greatest genius.

Bradley J. Birzer is Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and Professor of History, Hillsdale College. Co-founder and senior contributor of The Imaginative Conservative, he is also the author of several critically-acclaimed biographies, including those of Russell Kirk, Christopher Dawson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton. He is also proudly a member of Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom. Birzer and his wife, Dedra (also a professional historian), have seven children and divide their time between Michigan and South Dakota.

Justin Shubow is president of the National Civic Art Society, a non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., that advances the classical tradition in public art and architecture. He serves as the executive director of Rebuild Penn Station, a National Civic Art Society initiative to promote the reconstruction of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City designed by McKim, Mead & White, and he is a member of the Board of Academic Advisors for the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. He also serves on the Board of Advisors of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation.