Joel Alden Schlosser

Being hooded by Peter, May 2010 “Hello, this is Peter Euben from Duke University.” I can still recall the Bronx accent, the calm delivery, the unhesitating friendliness. I was sitting in my cubicle at Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft on Maiden Lane a few blocks from Wall Street. Peter sat, I imagine, in the Perkins Library Building office on Duke’s campus, where he often held long office hours amid piles of books and papers towering towards the third floor eves. A narrow leaded window overlooked the Chapel green and its patinaed statue of James B. Duke. In that first conversation, which took place before I ever met Peter, I experienced his interest in others as well as his strategic modesty. Despite my having so clearly advertised myself as a Straussian with Continental interests – those were the days! – Peter inquired about my thesis, listened to my interpretation of Plato’s theory of education, asked the appropriate questions. When the dialogue lulled, ...

A dozen or so students and a professor sit in a circle at individual desks, talking about how to write well. One student offers her ideas on writing introductions; another student across from her expands on the point, drawing on advice she received in AP English. The professor sits back in her seat, nodding affirmation. She scans the sleepy faces around her. When the discussion lulls, the professor leans forward to reiterate and reframe what’s been said, reinforcing her favored approach to that devilish problem for all writing: where to begin. So goes the typical scene of instruction, especially writing instruction. It happens in small-ish seminars where content, for once in the college curriculum, is subordinated to skills. Usually, these seminars feature a good bit of discussion. Writing instruction also forms part of the initiation of students into college: first years learn to write and seniors are expected to execute these lessons. Or at least this is the implicit princip...

Power, Plato, and the Good Life! Winter has arrived and I'm reprising two beloved courses from the past: Power and Resistance , which I first taught at Deep Springs College ( original syllabus here ) in Fall 2013, and Introduction to Ancient and Early Modern Political Philosophy , which I taught at Bryn Mawr ( original syllabus here ) in Fall 2015. I'm grateful to have the chance to rework and update these courses for new students and new times. Three weeks into classes, it has been delightful. In this year's  Power and Resistance ( syllabus ) , students will choose a topic such as "Power, Violence, and the State" or "Exploitation and Economic Power" and then map how the key theoretical texts we're reading joined and influenced an intellectual conversation stretching from the past into the future. The course follows the reading schedule of my Spring 2015 iteration ( syllabus here ), but I have changed the writing projects to introduce students to b...

A new academic year has arrived and I'm delighted to introduce two new courses: a first-year writing seminar (what we call at Bryn Mawr an Emily Balch Seminar ) on resistance, rebellion, and refusal; and an upper-level seminar on Justice. One week into the semester, each class has already begun to gel. It feels like it will be a terrific fall. The Emily Balch Seminar, "Resistance, Rebellion, and Refusal" ( syllabus here ) introduces students to writing through the lens of figures of resistance, theories of civil disobedience, and what I call practices of refusal. As we write and rewrite about these political and theoretical issues, we're reading some of my favorite texts like Sophocles' Antigone and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. We're also engaging the Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr , where Bonnie Honig will be talking about "Theaters of Refusal." My hope is that students can join this conversation as they imagine and develop their own...

(Joel in 2007. . .  and in 2017) When I entered the classroom in Duke’s Perkins Library for the beginning of my first ever course, I had a flutter of nervousness just like when I would mount the stage at one of my many piano recitals – a sudden lightness in my stomach as my hands began to perspire. But when I saw the students sitting around the long seminar table, another feeling immediately overtook the first: gratitude. Look at these interesting people all eager to learn something! And I’m the professor! I can’t believe this is my job. Forming that first class were students from Canada, China, Kazakstan, and the United States. I had students from north and south, east and west. I had a high school student, a senior who only needed these credits to graduate, and a midcareer public servant completing his policy degree. And we all assembled to study political philosophy. I remember that I introduced myself and asked the students to introduce one another. Then I lea...

I have begun my term as a Fellow at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. My primary undertaking here will consist in continuing to work on my book project on Herodotus and political theory. Here is a link to a long description of my project. The first paragraph gives an effective overview: How can social science research support and advance democracy and democratic citizenship? In this project, I turn to Herodotus, perhaps the world’s first social scientist, to reconstruct how his approach to social inquiry contributed to democratic projects in the ancient world and might also offer an alternative to today’s paradigms. Herodotus’s Histories , I argue, model a form of inquiry dedicated to improving the people’s capacity to rule and be ruled in turn and promise a social science that empowers free and democratic regimes to develop self-supporting regimes of truth and forms of inquiry. The example of Herodotus can thus provide us with an approach to research wh...

This year I had the great pleasure of teaching a sequence of courses in the history of political thought: “Ancient and Early Modern Political Philosophy” in the fall and “Modern Political Philosophy” this spring. Even better, nine students took both courses, creating a terrific group of youthful political philosophers dedicated to the “big questions” of political philosophy and conversant with writers from Herodotus to Frantz Fanon. I still have my doubts about the adequacy of the canon, but I had a little faith restored this year. Witnessing how students not only responded to these great books but took them up with vitality and excitement reminded me why such courses exist. Contemporary writers such as Charles Taylor or Shulamith Firestone simply mean more when one has worked through Marx. The student of ancient political philosophy’s politeia can discern the fallaciousness of the liberal-communitarian debate as it’s typically posed. A serious reader of the Stoics sees anarchism ...