THE TEAM
GIUSEPPE BALLACCI (P.I.)
Giuseppe Ballacci is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society at the University of Minho and has been visiting scholar at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Chicago, KU Leuven, and associate researcher of the Centre de Théorie Politique at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He has written and researched on topics from both contemporary political theory and the history of political thought, in particular on questions related to democratic theory, representation, populism and rhetoric. His essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as Representation, Contemporary Political Theory, Populism, the Review of Politics, Theoria, Redescriptions, Filosofický časopis, Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana and Foro Interno. In 2018 he published Political Theory between Philosophy and Rhetoric: Politics as Transcendence and Contingency (Palgrave MacMillan), a book in which he analyses the multifaceted significance of the ancient quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy for contemporary political theory. Currently, he is working (together with Rob Goodman) on an edited book on the history of populism, titled Populism, Demagoguery and Rhetoric in Historical Perspective, under contract with Oxford University Press.
ROB GOODMAN (Co-PI)
Rob Goodman is Assistant Professor of Politics at Toronto Metropolitical University. He is a political theorist and former U.S. House and Senate speechwriter who has researched and written extensively on the history of political thought and particularly on the history of rhetoric and its relevance for contemporary politics. His first book, Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions (Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores the role of eloquence and its institutional settings, from ancient to twentieth century political thought, bringing to the fore its potential for democratic politics.
Goodman’s work has been published in journals including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, History of Political Thought, the European Journal of Political Theory, and the Review of Politics. He is currently at work on a new project, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, on the transformation of classical rhetoric in African American political thought.
TAE-YEOUN KEUM
Tae-Yeoun Keum is Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research explores the extent to which politics can and should be guided by figurative elements in our thinking like myths, metaphors, and symbols. Her first book, Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought (Harvard University Press, 2020), examined Plato’s philosophical myths and their legacy in modern political thought. The project received the 2021 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities and the 2020 István Hont Prize for the “best book in Intellectual History.” She is now working on a book about a set of postwar German debates about symbolic politics, provisionally titled “The Symbolic Politics of Blumenberg, Habermas, and Schmitt.”
ALESSANDRO MULIERI
Alessandro Mulieri is a Global Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at University of Pennsylvania and Ca’ Foscari University in Venice as well as a Research Associate at KU Leuven. He was trained in Intellectual History, Political Science and Philosophy at University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, The London School of Economics and the KU Leuven. He was previously a Senior Research Fellow at KU Leuven and has held visiting research and teaching positions at Columbia University, University of Amsterdam, the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences po), Humboldt Universiteit in Berlin, University of Strasbourg and American University of Rome. His research focuses on the history of political thought, with a specialization in late medieval and early modern political thought, Machiavelli studies and contemporary political theory. He has co-edited Marsilius of Padua between History, Politics and Philosophy (Brepols, forthcoming 2023) and Radical Republicanism in Early Modern Europe (Brill, forthcoming 2023). His work has appeared in History of Political Thought, European Journal of Political Theory, Intellectual History Review, Storia e Politica, History of European Ideas and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, among others.
DAVID RAGAZZONI
David Ragazzoni is a Lecturer in the Political Science Department at Columbia University, New York, where he received his PhD in Political Theory and where he works and teaches in the history of political and legal ideas. His research focuses on historical and contemporary debates on political parties, the transformations of representative government and democracy, and the history of democratic theory. His work has been published in Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, Journal of Political Ideologies, Ethics and International Affairs, Journal of Modern Italian Studies. His latest book projects are Hans Kelsen on Constitutional Democracy: Genesis, Theory, Legacies (co-edited with Sandrine Baume, forthcoming with Cambridge UP) and Hans Kelsen on Constitutional Democracy and Political Philosophy: Selected Writings (1920s-1930s) (co-edited with Lars Vinx, under contract with Oxford UP).
THOMÁS ZICMAN BARROS (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Thomás Zicman de Barros is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society at the University of Minho and has been Research Associate at the Centre for Political Research (CEVIPOF), Sciences Po Paris. He currently develops his research activity on the articulation of subaltern, queer, and populist studies from a historical perspective, focusing on Latin America. He has taught democratic theory in various universities and has published on populism, political identities, and the interdisciplinary dialogue between political theory and psychoanalysis in journals such as Representation, Constellations, the Journal of Political Ideologies, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, and Nouvelles Perspectives en Sciences Sociales. With Miguel Lago, he co-authored, in Portuguese, Do que falamos quando falamos de populismo [What We Talk About When We Talk About Populism] (Companhia das Letras, 2022), a book that discusses historical and contemporary populism through an analysis of the incorporation of marginalised subjects in politics.
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DANIEL KAPUST (Consultant)
Daniel Kapust is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kapust’s research focuses on the history of political thought, especially Roman, Florentine, early modern, and 18th century, with thematic interests in rhetoric, empire, classical receptions, democratic theory, and the republican tradition. His first book, Republicanism, Rhetoric, and Roman Political Thought: Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011; his second book, Flattery in the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. He has published articles and chapters on Hobbes, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Cicero, Sallust, Livy, Lucretius, Smith, Tacitus, and 18th century American political thought, along with topics including flattery, republicanism, rhetoric, censorship, and political fear. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Political Theory, Political Studies, History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Ideas, Democracy and Security, and the European Journal of Political Theory. He is currently working on two new book projects: one on Lucretius and early modern political thought (The Lucretian Moment: Lucretius and the Politics of Early Modernity), the other on imperial republics (The Tragedy of an Imperial Republic). He is also the Director of the Political Economy, Philosophy, and Politics Certificate Program.
JAN-WERNER MÜLLER (Consultant)
Jan-Werner Müller studied at the Free University, Berlin, University College, London, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and Princeton University. From 1996 until 2003 he was a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford; from 2003 until 2005 he was Fellow in Modern European Thought at the European Studies Centre, St. Antony’s College. Since 2005 he has been teaching in the Politics Department, Princeton University, where is currently Professor of Politics. Müller has been a visiting fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, Collegium Helsinki, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and a number of other institutes. He has taught as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, the Ludwig Maximilians-Universität in Munich, American University, Beirut, the Law School of Haifa University, the Humboldt Universität in Berlin, and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris. He has delivered the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford and the Tanner Lectures at Cambridge; he is scheduled to deliver lectures at the Collège de France in 2024. Müller is a co-founder of the European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin (ECLA; today: Bard Berlin), Berlin. He maintains a strong interest in international teaching and research initiatives centered on the liberal arts. Müller is the author of Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (Yale UP, 2000), A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (Yale UP, 2003); he is also the editor of Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge UP 2002) and German Ideologies since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic (Palgrave 2003). His book Constitutional Patriotism was published by Princeton University Press in 2007. His history of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, Contesting Democracy, was published by Yale University Press in 2011. His book Was ist Populismus? was published by Suhrkamp in April 2016; the University of Pennsylvania Press brought out an American version in September of 2016. Mueller's book Furcht und Freiheit: Für einen anderen Liberalismus was published by Suhrkamp in 2019 and won the Bavarian Book Prize. 2021 saw the publication of Democracy Rules by FSG in the US and Penguin in the UK. His public affairs commentary and essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, the New York Times, and Project Syndicate.
NADIA URBINATI (Consultant)
Nadia Urbinati, Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University, is a political theorist who specializes in modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic and anti-democratic traditions. She co-chaired the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on Political and Social Thought and was a co-editor with Andrew Arato of the academic journal Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Foundation Reset Dialogues on Civilization and the Feltrinelli Foundation (Milan). She has been a member of the School of Social Sciences of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship in the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. She is permanent visiting professor at the Scuola Superiore de Studi Universitari e Perfezionamento Sant'Anna of Pisa (Italy), and taught at Bocconi University (Milan), SciencesPo (Paris) and the University UNICAMP (Brazil). In 2008 the President of the Italian Republic awarded Professor Urbinati the Commendatore della Repubblica. Professor Urbinati is the author of Me The People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (Harvard UP, 2019), which received the Capalbio International Prize in 2020; The Tyranny of the Moderns (Yale UP, 2015); Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth and the People (Harvard UP, 2014); Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and of Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize as the best book in liberal and democratic theory. She has edited Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism (Princeton University Press, 1994); Piero Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution (Yale UP, 2002). She co-edited several books, in particular: with Monique Canto-Sperber Le socialism libéral: Une anthologie; Europe-États-Unis (Éditions Esprit 2003); with Alex Zakaras, John Stuart Mill's Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 2007); with Stefano Recchia, A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini's Writings on Democracy, Nation Building and International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2009); with Steven Lukes, Condorcet's Political Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2012); with Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti, Hans Kelsen’s On the Worth and Values of Democracy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013); with Lisa Disch and Mathijs van de Sande, The Constructivism Turn in Political Representation (Edinburg University Press, 2019). Professor Urbinati has published articles in numerous international scholarly journals and is a political columnist for Italian newspapers.