Forbidden courses

Glenn Loury is Professor of Economics and Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. An academic economist, Professor Loury has published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of race and inequality. He is a fellow of the Manhattan Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society as well as a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2005, he received the John von Neumann Award, given annually by the Rajk László College of the Budapest University of Economic Science and Public Administration to "an outstanding economist whose research has exerted a major influence on students of the College over an extended period of time." He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Scholarship to support his work. He has given the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford (2007), the James A. Moffett '29 Lectures in Ethics at Princeton (2003), and the DuBois Lectures in African American Studies at Harvard (2000). A prominent social critic and public intellectual writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, he has published more than 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the US and abroad. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic. His book One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (The Free Press, 1995) won the American Book Award and the Christianity Today Book Award. Loury holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T.

Mark Lilla was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1956, and was educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. After holding professorships at New York University and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he joined Columbia University in 2007 as Professor of the Humanities. He has been awarded fellowships by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Institut d’études avancées (Paris), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the American Academy in Rome. In 1995 he was inducted into the French Order of Academic Palms. Lilla is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and publications worldwide. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lectures widely and has delivered the Weizmann Memorial Lecture in Israel and the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University. In 2015, Overseas Press Club of America awarded him its prize for Best Commentary on International News in Any Medium.

Luana Maroja is a Professor of Biology at Williams College where she serves as Chair of the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program. Her areas of expertise and research focus include evolutionary genetics, speciation, and landscape genetics. Maroja has received National Science Foundation awards for her work in these areas. She holds an undergraduate degree from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (B.S., 1999), a graduate degree from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (M.S., 2001), and a Ph.D. from Cornell University (2008).

Matthew B. Crawford attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he majored in physics. Later he earned a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, specializing in ancient political thought. He is the author of three books: Shopclass as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, The World Beyond Your Head, and Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road and writes a Substack, titled Archedelia: Toward a Political Theory of the Present. Currently he is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, but lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Professor Jacob Howland is Director of UATX’s Intellectual Foundations program, which comprises the first two years of our undergraduate curriculum. Previously, Howland served as McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa and Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund. He is the author of five books and one edited book, including two on Plato’s Republic as well as studies of Kierkegaard and the Talmud. Howland’s articles have appeared in The New Criterion, City Journal, and The Nation, among others.

Sole author of fifteen books and about 356 articles, Professor McCloskey is an economist and economic historian who around 1980 got interested in the rhetoric of persuasion in her field, and then wider literary matters, such as literary and social theory. Her main project for the next few years will be writing a six-volume tome on “The Bourgeois Era.” Volume 1, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, came out from the University of Chicago Press in 2006. Volume 2, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, came out in 2010. Her early “cliometric” work on British economic history concerned the performance of the British economy in the late 19th century and the workings of open-field agriculture in the 13th. Thus Economic Maturity and Entrepreneurial Decline: British Iron and Steel, 1870-1913 (1973) and Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain: Essays in Historical Economics (1981) and numerous articles on open fields, the industrial revolution, and the gold standard. After a long excursus into rhetoric (The Rhetoric of Economics [1985] and other books in the 1990s), the “bourgeois” project is a return to history, viewed more than quantitatively.

Kathleen Stock is an UnHerd columnist, former professor of philosophy and Founding Faculty Fellow at UATX.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a Visting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College,  a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. He was previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from New America, Yaddo, MacDowell, and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. His next book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf.