AHI and Skidmore’s Benjamin Franklin Forum Co-Sponsor Annual Undergraduate Conference on the American Polity

The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI) is pleased to announce its co-sponsorship of the Annual Undergraduate Conference on the American Polity with Skidmore College’s Benjamin Franklin Forum.  The conference will take place April 1-2 at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.  On Friday evening, April 1 at 6:00 p.m. Diana Schaub, Professor, Department of Political Science, Loyola University Maryland, will deliver the keynote address.  Sessions and student panels will be held on Saturday, April 2 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and are open to the public. For registration or further information, please contact Robert L. Paquette bob@theahi.org or Flagg Taylor ftaylor@skidmore.edu.

The topic of this year’s conference is the American polity broadly understood.  The conference seeks to provide elite undergraduate students from across the country with the experience of presenting an academic research paper to an audience of their peers. AHI Charter Fellow Douglas Ambrose and AHI Resident Fellow David Frisk will be among the scholars who will participate as commentators on the panels. In previous conferences, student papers have ranged widely, covering topics in religion, history, economics, philosophy, and political science.

Keynote speaker Diana Schaub, a member of the Hoover Institution’s Jill and Boyd Smith Task Force on the Virtues of a Free Society, was the recipient in 2001 of the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters. From 2004 to 2009 she was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. She is the author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), along with a number of book chapters and articles in the fields of political philosophy and American political thought. She is also a co-editor (with Amy and Leon Kass) of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song (ISI, 2011). She is a contributing editor for The New Atlantis; her work has also appeared in National Affairs, The New Criterion, The Public Interest, The American Enterprise, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, The American Interest, and City Journal.