Fellows
The Elm Institute’s Fellows contribute to, collaborate with, and advise in the intellectual life of the Institute.
Carlos Eire
Yale University
Carlos Eire (G ‘97) is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies. He specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; and the history of the supernatural, and the history of death. He developed and regularly teaches one of the most popular courses in the Department of Religious Studies, “The Catholic Intellectual Tradition.” Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for two years.
He is the author of War Against the Idols (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016), winner of the R.R. Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association; and The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila (2019). His memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003) won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Bryan Garsten
Yale University
Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science and the Humanities at Yale. He is the author of Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006) as well as articles on political rhetoric and deliberation, the meaning of representative government, the relationship of politics and religion, and the place of emotions in political life. Garsten is now finishing a book called The Heart of a Heartless World that examines the ethical, political and religious core of early nineteenth century liberalism in the United States and France. He has also edited Rousseau, the Enlightenment, and Their Legacies, a collection of essays by the Rousseau scholar Robert Wokler (Princeton University Press, 2012). His writings have won various awards, including the First Book Prize of the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association.In 2012-2013 he served as Chair of a committee overseeing the development of a common curriculum in the liberal arts for Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His work in the classroom earned him the 2008 Poorvu Family Prize for Interdisciplinary Teaching. He has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Yale’s major in Ethics, Politics and Economics and the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Political Science. In 2016 he founded the Citizens, Thinkers, Writers program for students in the New Haven public schools. A graduate of Harvard College, he received his MPhil from the University of Cambridge and his PhD from Harvard University.
Sherif Girgis
University of Notre Dame Law School
Sherif Girgis is Associate Professor of Law. His work at the intersection of philosophy and law—including criminal law, constitutional theory, and jurisprudence—has appeared or is forthcoming in academic and popular venues including the New York University Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy of Law, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He is coauthor of What Is Marriage? (Encounter Books, 2012) and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Prior to joining the faculty of Notre Dame Law School, he practiced appellate and complex civil litigation at Jones Day in Washington, D.C., having previously served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, Jr., of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Thomas B. Griffith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Now completing his PhD in philosophy at Princeton, Girgis earned his JD at Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Felix S. Cohen Prize for best paper in legal philosophy. He earned a BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford while studying as a Rhodes Scholar and a Bachelor’s in Philosophy from Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude.
Philip Gorski
Yale University
Philip Gorski is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale and Co-Director of Yale's Center for Comparative Research. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development, and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. Other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life. He is the author of The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Growth of State Power in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion (Stanford University Press, 2004), and The Protestant Ethic Revisited (Temple University Press, 2011). He was educated at Deep Springs College and Harvard University and received his PhD from University of California, Berkeley.
Mordechai Levy-Eichel
Yale University
Mordechai is a lecturer in the Political Science Department and Humanities Program at Yale, where he hides his formal academic identity as a historian, and his escapades as a critic, and general scholarly skeptic of scholarship. He primarily works on the history and philosophy of learning and education, having had a fairly idiosyncratic education himself, ranging from various yeshivot to homeschooling to the University of Chicago. Trained as an early modern Atlantic and European historian who somehow often spends his time exploring the bowels of nineteenth-century America, he is writing an episodic history on the rise of the modern university and the research ideal. He has published both in academic journals and in popular magazines, ranging from Intellectual History Review to Tablet to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
His dissertation on the spread of early modern mathematical learning was awarded the Elizabethan Prize for “outstanding work on literature, arts, or culture of the Renaissance,” and in 2022 he was the inaugural winner of the Lux et Veritas faculty teaching award which “recognizes a Yale faculty member who actively fosters intellectual diversity for students in and out of the classroom.” When the spirit moves him, he posts at antieducation.substack.com.
Margarita Mooney Suarez
Princeton Theological Seminary
Margarita Mooney Suarez ('95) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she teaches classes such as on philosophy of social science, intentional communities, and Christianity and the Liberal Arts Tradition. Professor Mooney Suarez founded Scala Foundation in 2016 and continues to serve as Scala’s Executive Director. Scala’s mission is to infuse meaning and purpose into American education by restoring a classical liberal arts education. At Scala’s conferences, reading groups, seminars, webinars, student trips, intellectual retreats, and intensive summer program, Scala equips students, writers, artists, intellectuals and teachers with the ideas and networks needed to revitalize culture.
After receiving her BA in Psychology from Yale College, she conducted fieldwork on the re-integration into civilian life of ex-combatants in Central America. She then earned a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University, publishing her dissertation as the book, Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora (University of California Press, 2009). Dr. Mooney Suarez’s s most recent book with Cluny Media, The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts (2021), grew out of her decades of experience as a teacher and scholar. She is also the co-author (with Camille Z. Charles, Mary S. Fischer, and Douglas S. Massey) of Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton University Press, 2009). In addition to Princeton Theological Seminary, she has been a faculty member at Princeton University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Pepperdine and Yale University. While on the faculty at Yale from 2013-2016, she was faculty resident fellow of Calhoun (Hopper) College and began her ongoing collaboration with the Elm Institute.
James Murphy
Dartmouth College
James Murphy ('80 G'90) is Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, where he has taught since 1990. After graduating from Yale College, he earned a Master’s in City Planning from M.I.T. and worked as a city planner in the City of New York. His Ph.D. in Philosophy and Political Science is from Yale University (1990). His research interests include: Aristotle, jurisprudence, semiotics, political economy, philosophy of education, and political theology. In 2008, Professor Murphy founded the Daniel Webster Project at Dartmouth College to provide greater structure and focus for the liberal arts experience. The Webster Project sponsors conferences and lectures as well as proposals for curricular reform. His books include The Moral Economy of Labor: Aristotelian Themes in Economic Theory (Yale University Press, 1993), The Philosophy of Positive Law (Yale University Press, 2005), The Philosophy of Customary Law (Oxford University Press, 2014), A Genealogy of Violence: René Girard in Dialogue (Sussex Academic Press, 2018), and Your Whole Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
James L. Nolan, Jr.
Williams College
James Nolan, Jr., is the Washington Gladden 1859 Professor of Sociology at Williams College. His teaching and research interests fall within the general areas of law and society, culture, technology and social change, and historical comparative sociology. His books include The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End (NYU Press, 1998), Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court Movement (Princeton University Press, 2001), Legal Accents, Legal Borrowing: The International Problem Solving Court Movement (Princeton University Press, 2009), and, most recently, What They Saw in America: Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G.K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He is the recipient of several grants and awards including National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships and a Fulbright scholarship. He has held visiting fellowships at Oxford University, Loughborough University, and the University of Notre Dame. He is a graduate of University of California – Davis, and received his PhD from the University of Virginia.
Danilo Petranovich
Abigail Adams Institute
Danilo Petranovich (G’07) is the Director of Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Petranovich has taught political science at Duke and Yale Universities, where he offered courses on liberalism and conservatism in the United States, American political thought, the American presidency, ethical leadership, nationalism and patriotism, and the history of Western political philosophy, as well as two seminars on William F. Buckley’s role in American politics (Dr. Petranovich served for seven months as Bill Buckley’s amanuensis). Dr. Petranovich is currently writing a book (under contract with Yale University Press) about the three-decade duel between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, which resulted, he argues, in a transformation of American nationhood. He received his BA from Harvard and his PhD in Political Science from Yale.
Noël Valis
Yale University
Noël Valis (PhD, Bryn Mawr College) is Professor of Spanish at Yale University. Her research interests are centered on modern Spanish literature, culture, and history. Her books include The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Class in Modern Spain (Duke University Press, 2002), which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War (Modern Language Association, 2007), and Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (Yale University Press, 2010). Her translation of Noni Benegas’ poetry, Burning Cartography (Host Publications, 2008), received the New England Council of Latin American Studies Best Book Translation Prize. A novella, The Labor of Longing (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2014), was a Finalist for the Prize Americana for Prose and a Finalist in two categories, Novella and Regional Fiction, for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. In 2017, she was awarded the Victoria Urbano Academic Achievement Prize by the International Association of Hispanic Women’s Literature and Culture. A Corresponding Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Professor Valis was appointed a member of the NEH’s National Council on the Humanities in 2019.