Tocqueville Forum

Postdoctoral Fellow

Brian Smith is the Tocqueville Forum's inaugural Jack Miller Postdoctoral Fellow. In the 2008-9 Academic Year, he will teach courses in the American political tradition and continue to convene the Tocqueville Forum's undergraduate reading group. In Fall 2008, he will teach "Machiavelli and the Art of Statecraft," an undergraduate seminar which examines this seminal figure in the context of other ideals of statesmanship. This and his other syllabi may be found here.

A political theorist, Brian completed his doctorate in Government at Georgetown University in July 2008. His dissertation dealt with the notions of nostalgia, historical memory, and declinism in the political thought of Rousseau, Burke, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche. Brian’s essays have been published or will soon appear in the journals Polity, Society, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, and Perspectives on Political Science; his 2006 Interpretation article on Adam Smith won the 2007 Templeton Enterprise Award for the best article published on the culture of enterprise by a scholar under the age of 40 in the previous year. The recipient of H.B. Earhart, Richard M. Weaver, Humane Studies, Publius, and Andrew W. Mellon fellowships, Brian attended Moorpark College from 1998-2000, earned his B.A. in History with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002, and in 2005 was awarded the M.A. in Security Studies from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. His c.v. may be found here.