Scholarship & a Free Society

• Overview
• Location
• Topics
• Faculty
• Readings
• Application Preview
• FAQs

Stephen Davies 
IHS Program Officer & IEA Education Director, Institute for Humane Studies & Institute of Economic Affairs
Steve Davies is program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies. He joined IHS from the United Kingdom where he was Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Economic History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Dr. Davies co-edited, with Nigel Ashford, The Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought and wrote several entries for The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, edited by Ronald Hamowy, including the introduction. He is the author of Empiricism and History and several articles and essays on topics including the private provision of public goods and the history of crime and criminal justice. He recently completed a book on the history of the world since 1250 and the origins of modernity. »»

David Schmidtz
Philosophy, University of Arizona
David Schmidtz has lectured at more than 50 universities, in 20 countries, on six continents. He is author of Rational Choice and Moral Agency, Elements of Justice, andPerson, Polis, Planet. He recently published, with Jason Brennan, A Brief History of Liberty. »»

Peter Boettke

Economics, George Mason University
Peter J. Boettke is a professor of economics at George Mason University, the Deputy Director of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy, and the Research Director of the Global Prosperity Initiative at the Mercatus Center. Dr. Boettke has won teaching awards including the Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching from New York University. He received his BA in economics from Grove City College and his PhD in economics from George Mason University. Before joining the faculty at George Mason University in 1998, he held faculty positions at Oakland University, Manhattan College, and New York University. »»

Bryan Caplan

Associate Economics Professor, George Mason University
Bryan Caplan wrote The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies(Princeton University Press, 2007). His articles have appeared in the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Law and Economics, Social Science Quarterly, and numerous other outlets.»» 

Antony Davies

Economics, Duquesne University
Antony Davies’ areas of research include forecasting and rational expectations, consumer behavior, international economics, and mathematical economics. Most recently, Dr. Davies presented his research on standardized testing in public schools to senior staff at the U.S. Congress. »»

Jacob Levy

Political Theory, McGill University. 
Jacob Levy's research interests include multiculturalism, ethnicity, and nationalism; early modern and Enlightenment political thought; constitutionalism and jurisprudence; and federalism and pluralism. He is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, a position he has held since 2006. He wrote The Multiculturalism of Fear (Oxford University Press) and articles in journals including The American Political Science Review, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, Nomos, and Social Philosophy and Policy as well as numerous contributed chapters to edited volumes. He holds a BA from Brown Unversity (Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude) with honors in Political Science; an MA and PhD in Politics from Princeton Universty; and an LL.M. from the University of Chicago Law School. »»

Michael Valdez-Moses

English, Duke University 
Michael Valdez Moses is Associate Professor of English and a founding member of the Gerst Program for Political, Economic, and Humanistic Studies at Duke University.  He grew up in Los Angeles and was educated at Harvard, New College, Oxford, and the University of Virginia.  He is the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (Oxford, 1995), editor of the essay collections,The Writings of J. M. Coetzee (Duke UP, 1994), and Modernism and Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and co-editor ofModernism and Colonialism:  British and Irish Literature, 1900-1939 (Duke UP, 2007).  His main interests are in 20th-century British, Irish, comparative, and postcolonial literatures, modern cinema, and in the history of classical liberal political thought. He is co-editor of the journal, Modernist Cultures, and a contributing editor of Reason magazine. Professor Moses is the 2011-2012 recipient of the Roger B. Cox Distinguished Teaching Award given by Duke University.  »»

Readings »