The Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government (CCCG) is pleased to welcome four visiting scholars for the 2022-2023 academic year.
Richard Avramenko is a visiting scholar from the University of Wisconsin, where he has taught courses in both Political Science and Integrated Liberal Studies since 2005. His main areas of interest are ancient and continental political thought, and he has written on topics such as Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, St. Augustine, Dostoevsky, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Voegelin, Heidegger, Canadian identity politics, and mortgage and housing policy.
Dr. Avramenko is the author of Courage: The Politics of Life and Limb, and has co-edited Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought, Dostoevsky’s Political Thought, and Aristocratic Souls in Democratic Times. Dr. Avramenko is currently working on a new book manuscript titled The Crush of Democracy: Tocqueville and the Egalitarian Mind.
Margaret Blume Freddoso will join the CCCG as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She received her doctorate in theology from the University of Notre Dame with a focus on ancient and medieval theology, especially the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
Dr. Freddoso has launched the CCCG’s initiative titled, “Natural Economic Order: What are the Necessary Components of a Good Economy?” The underlying aim of the project is to investigate the fundamental harmony between the Catholic understanding of creation and God's governance of the universe on the one hand, and modern economics' empirical discoveries about economic order on the other. In collaboration with Notre Dame Economics professor Kirk Doran, Dr. Freddoso’s will create and teach an undergraduate course, “Economy: Divine and Human,” write an undergraduate textbook based upon this course, develop undergraduate discussion seminars, and initiate a scholarly research agenda on the harmony between the Catholic understanding of order in the universe, and the empirical findings of modern economics.
Dr. Freddoso has taught as an adjunct professor in Notre Dame's Program of Liberal Studies and at the Augustine Institute, and she has worked for Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life. She received a masters in theology from the University of Notre Dame and attended Yale University, where she studied philosophy and literature. She is a co-founder and board member of St. Thomas More Academy.
Luke Foster returns to the CCCG as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Political Science. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where he wrote a political theory dissertation on the question of elite education in democracy entitled “Excellence for the Democratic Age: Liberal Education and the Mixed Regime.”
Prior to coming to Notre Dame, Dr. Foster was a Visiting Research Fellow and Lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris. He graduated from Columbia University in 2015, where he studied English and history. This semester, he will teach “Constitutionalism, Law, and Politics II: American Constitutionalism.”
Mary Frances Myler is a 2022-2023 post-graduate fellow with the CCCG. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame, where she majored in the Program of Liberal Studies with minors in theology and constitutional studies. As a student, she was a Menard Family Tocqueville Fellow, and she served as editor-in-chief of the Irish Rover. She is currently working on a book about the contemporary state of higher education, with a particular focus on Catholic universities.
All visiting scholars have offices on the second floor of Jenkins-Nanovic Hall:
- Avramenko - Office 2011
- Freddoso - Office 2035
- Foster - Office 2047
- Myler - Office 2033