Finishing an Eventful Semester

 

Dear Friends of the Politics Department,

It’s been an eventful spring semester for us, with much to report on what our faculty, students, and alumni have been doing since our last newsletter. You can learn more on our news and events page and our Instagram feed as well. As always, if you have any items to contribute to our next newsletter, please do not hesitate to send them to me (greenm@cua.edu).

Many of our events are made possible by alumni donations to the department’s Annual Fund. If you are interested in supporting the Fund or helping the department in other ways, you can learn more here.

Meatball hopes that everyone has a chance over the summer to relax and look at the world from a new perspective.

Upside down cat

Matthew Green
Professor and Vice Chair
Department of Politics   

Remembering Lee Edwards

   edwards-pic.jpg

One of our most beloved alumni and instructors, Lee Edwards, passed away in December. Dr. Edwards, who received his doctoral degree from the department, had an enormous number of accomplishments, including cofounding the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, serving as Distinguished Fellow of Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation, and writing over two dozen books. He also taught several courses for the department over the years and, in 2022, served as a distinguished lecturer at Catholic University. (More details about his many achievements can be found here, here, and here.) He is greatly missed by all of us.

Our Faculty


Recent faculty achievements include:

  • Justin Litke presented his paper “The (Catholic?) Soul of the Republic: Charles Carroll on the Seat of Virtue in Republican Government” at the Southern Political Science Association.

  •  Sarah Gustafson delivered a talk entitled “Lamentation, Justice, and the Limits of Politics” at a conference at Princeton University and presented a paper at the American Politics and Government Summit sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

  • Matthew Green discussed the history of the House of Representatives at a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill sponsored by the American Historical Association and provided on-air commentary for C-SPAN during the opening day of the 119th Congress.

  • David Walsh’s book Person Means Relation was published by St. Augustine's Press.

book cover

  • Andrew Yeo published a guest column, “Optimistic view of US-Korea alliance,” in The Korea Herald.

  • Thomas Smith’s coauthored book The Young Adult Playbook: Living Like It Matters was reviewed in The Catholic Thing. 

  • Gustavo Santos presented a paper entitled "Family Public Policy: From Defamilization to a Relational Perspective” at the 14th Annual Symposium on Transforming Culture: Marriage in the Peripheries, held at Benedictine College, Kansas.

  • Jakub Grygiel published a guest editorial, “America’s Approach to Its Allies Is Backward,” in the Wall Street Journal.

  • Michael Promisel, Justin Litke, and Sarah Gustafson helped organized two Carrol Forum lectures on campus, one featuring Phillip Muñoz and one featuring Susan Hanssen of the University of Dallas.

     

Student and Alumni Achievements

  • Ryan Fecteau (BA 2014) was sworn in as speaker of the House of Maine in January, becoming the first person to resume the Maine speakership after a break in service since the 1960s.
  • David An (Ph.D 2021), pictured below, joined the faculty at New York University as a doctoral lecturer. 

  • David An
  • Jeffrey Crouch (Ph.D 2008) was quoted in a New York Times article about President Biden’s decision to issue a pardon to his son Hunter Biden.
  • Thomas Holman (Ph.D 2024) received a post-doc fellowship from the James Madison Program at Princeton University and the Provost’s Teaching Excellence in Early Career Award, and his coedited volume Personalism for the Twenty-First Century was published by Lexington Books.
  • Politics senior Arianna Salerno was chosen as the recipient for the department's Joseph A. Amoddio Award (for public service and civic responsibility), and politics senior Jakob Ottaway-Velder was chosen as the recipient for the department's James E. Dornan Award (for the most distinguished politics major).
  • Nathan-Raegan Stickney’s paper “Why Establishing Term Limits on the U.S. Supreme Court Should Be Avoided” was accepted for publication in Aspectus, the online magazine published by the university’s undergraduate research journal Inventio.
  • Felipe Mosquera was invited to participate in two research symposiums, the Democracy and Governance Research Symposium at Georgetown University and the William and Mary Graduate Research Symposium.