James Lindley Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research interests span political philosophy, ethics, and law. Most of his work focuses on normative democratic theory, including the moral evaluation of democracy and  what democratic ideals require of citizens and institutions. His book, Democratic Equality (Princeton University Press, 2019), articulates the moral force of the democratic idea that all citizens are equal political authorities, and to explain how that abstract idea ought to regulate the design and operation of political institutions, such as elections and representative systems. This involves development of philosophical theories of social equality and of authority relations. The book also addresses practical political controversies—criticizing unequal representation in the U.S. Senate and Electoral College; defending the legitimacy of campaign finance regulation; addressing the fair representation of groups, including racial minorities; and explaining the proper place of judicial review in a democracy. In responding to such applied questions in a philosophically principled way, Jim’s work on political equality aims to provide a deeper understanding of democracy’s value, and its close relation to other ideals of social, economic, and racial equality. Democratic Equality was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Order of the Coif Book Award for “outstanding publications that evidence creative talent of the highest order” in legal studies and related fields. 

Jim also writes on the history of political thought (with emphasis on democratic thought), including the work of Aristotle, Kant, and the Federalists. His current work addresses the relationship of democracy and individual autonomy; global political justice; and moral problems occasioned by democratic backsliding and political violence. He has published articles in Philosophy & Public Affairs, the American Political Science Review, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Political Theory, and the Review of Politics.

Classes Jim has taught include Racial Justice and Injustice; Freedom, Justice, and Legitimacy (w/ Chiara Cordelli); Democracy and Equality; Global Justice and the Politics of Empire (w/ Adom Getachew); Contemporary Egalitarianism; The Ethics of War; Introduction to Political Theory; John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (w/ Chiara Cordelli); and Classics of Social and Political Thought I, II, and III.

Jim received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2011, and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 2007. He graduated from Harvard University, with an A.B. in Social Studies, in 2002.

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College and Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. She is also Associate Faculty in Anthropology. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). Among her articles are the following: “Conceptualizing ‘Culture’: Possibilities for Political Science” (2002); “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy” (2004); “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise” (2009); “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science” (2010); “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (2013); and “Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East” (2016). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. For Authoritarian Apprehensions, she received the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award (2020), sponsored by the Interpretative Methodologies and Methods group; the APSA’s inaugural Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award (2020); the IPSA award for Concept Analysis in Political Science (2021); and the Gordon J. Laing Award (2022), given annually for the book that brings the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press. She has completed an edited volume with Joseph Masco entitled Conspiracy/Theory (forthcoming Duke University Press, 2024); she is in the process of coediting an Oxford University Handbook, with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth, tentatively entitled Reimagining Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press); and, with Aarjen Glas and Jessica Soedirgo, the interpretive methods part of an Oxford University Handbook on Methodological Pluralism in Political Science (edited by Janet Box-Steffensmeier et al.). Wedeen is also beginning work on a monograph on violence and temporality.

Professor Nathan Tarcov's scholarly interests include history of political theory, education and family in political theory, and principles of U.S. foreign policy. He has published Locke's Education for Liberty, Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, and The Legacy of Rousseau, and numerous articles on Machiavelli, Locke, the American founders, Leo Strauss, and such topics as constitutionalism, democracy and tyranny. He is one of the coordinators of the Political Theory Workshop and Director of The Leo Strauss Center.

Tarcov has been recognized for excellence in undergraduate teaching, receiving the University's Quantrell Award in 1997.

Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy.

Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory and how democracy functions in developing societies, distributive politics, and comparative political behavior.

Her single and co-authored books include Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (2001), Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics (2013), and Why Bother? Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests (2019). 

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

An economist and political scientist, Robinson has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the relationships between political power and institutions and prosperity. His work explores the underlying causes of economic and political divergence both historically and today and uses both the mathematical and quantitative methods of economics along with the case study, qualitative and fieldwork methodologies used in other social sciences.

Robinson has a particular interest in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and is a Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka. He taught a summer school at the University of the Andes in Bogotá between 1994 and 2022. He has conducted fieldwork and collected data in Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. He has published three books co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, an Institute Professor of Economics at MIT. The first, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, proposed a theory of the emergence of and stability of democracy and dictatorship. Their second book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (translated into 41 languages since its publication in 2012), pulled together much of their joint research on comparative development and proposed a theory of why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty. Their most recent book, The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty, examines the incessant and inevitable struggle between states and society, and gives an account of the deep historical processes that have shaped the modern world.

Jennifer Pitts is Professor of Political Science and the Committee on Social Thought and Chair of the department of Political Science. She is the author of Boundaries of the International (Harvard 2018), which explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the co-editor, with Adom Getachew, of W.E.B. Du Bois, International Thought, a collection of essays and speeches spanning the years 1900-1956 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). She is also author of A Turn to Empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton 2005); co-editor of The Law of Nations in Global History (Oxford 2017); and editor and translator of Alexis de Tocqueville: writings on empire and slavery (Johns Hopkins 2001). Her research interests lie in the fields of modern political and international thought, particularly British and French thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; empire; the history of international law; and global justice. She is a co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series Ideas in Context. At the University of Chicago, she is a member of the faculty boards for the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), the Human Rights Program, and the France Chicago Center. 

Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. Her next book with Cambridge University Press, published in 2022, is entitled After Authoritarianism: Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability. She has also published articles in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Parliamentary Affairs, and Constitutional Political Economy.

Monika Nalepa is the Director of the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab, which produces the Global Transitional Justice Dataset.

Sankar Muthu is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching interests in political theory and the history of political thought focus especially upon Enlightenment ideas and their legacies. He writes about the political theory of thinkers such as Rousseau, Diderot, Grégoire, Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Kant, Herder, Schiller, and Cugoano. 

Muthu is the author of Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton UP) and the editor of (and contributor to) Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge UP). He has published essays in journals such as Political Theory and Social Research, and he has contributed chapters to books such as Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment (Cambridge UP), The General Will: The Evolution of a Concept (Cambridge UP), and Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford UP). He is currently researching and writing two books on Enlightenment political thought: (1) Global Oppression and Enlightenment Resistance, which concerns Enlightenment-era philosophical analyses of global connections (such as travel, trade, communication, and exchange), cosmopolitan society, transnational oppression, and transcontinental institutions (including networks of slavery and joint stock trading companies); and (2) Inhuman Humanity in Enlightenment Political Thought, which investigates the manner in which humanity and inhumanity (or de-humanization) are related to one another across an array of French, German, Scottish, and English texts of the mid to late eighteenth century. 

Over the past several years, he has presented papers or given lectures on one or both of these ongoing projects at (among other places): the University of Oxford (conference on ‘Slavery in British Political Thought’); the Einstein Forum and Humboldt Forum in Potsdam and Berlin (conference on ‘Enlightenment in the World’); the Columbia University Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Culture; Princeton University (conference on ‘Fighting Words: Polemical Literature in the Age of Democratic Revolutions’); the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; the Academia Sinica (Taipei); in Kandersteg, Switzerland for the NYU Remarque Institute’s symposium on ‘Europe’s Encounters with Eighteenth-Century World Cultures’; and the Benedict Lecture in Political Philosophy at Boston University, as part of a conference on ‘Early Modern Philosophy and Slavery’.