George Washington Forum News and Events

Professor Maria Pia Paganelli

Professor Paganelli works in the history of economic thought, specializing in the 18th century. Her focus is on Adam Smith, David Hume, monetary theories, and the Scottish Enlightenment. Professor Paganelli analyzes how self-interest interacts with other motivational drives, with systematic biases, and with the surrounding institutional environment. She also explores the links between the Scottish Enlightenment and the results from behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and neuroeconomics.

Professor Jennifer Frey

Jennifer Frey is a professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy & Religion at The University of Tulsa. She is a faculty fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and a Newbigin Interfaith Fellow with The Carver Project. Prior to coming to Tulsa, she was an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, and prior to that, a collegiate assistant professor of the humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society for the Liberal Arts. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in philosophy and medieval studies (with a classics minor) at Indiana University-Bloomington.

Frey’s academic research is primarily on topics of moral psychology and virtue. In 2015, she was awarded a multi-million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation, titled “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life.” She frequently writes essays and book reviews for publications including First Things, Image, The Point, and the Wall Street Journal. She hosts a philosophy, theology, and literature podcast called “Sacred and Profane Love.”

Professor Elizabeth Anderson

Professor Elizabeth Anderson specializes in moral, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, social epistemology, and the philosophy of economics and the social sciences. She is particularly interested in exploring the interactions of social science with moral and political theory, how we learn to improve our value judgments, the epistemic functions of emotions and democratic deliberation, and issues of race, gender, and equality. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics, The Imperative of Integration, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It), and, most recently, Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back.  She has written numerous articles on value theory, the ethical limitations of markets, facts and values in social scientific research, feminist and social epistemology, racial integration and affirmative action, rational choice and social norms, democratic theory, egalitarianism, and the history of ethics. Professor Anderson is currently working on the history of egalitarianism.

Professor Anderson is a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Philosophical Society.  She designed and was the first Director of the Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at UM.

Professor Daniel Markovits

Daniel Markovits is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law. Markovits publishes widely and in a range of disciplines, including law, philosophy, and economics. His writings have appeared in Science, The American Economic Review, The Yale Law Journal, PNAS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and The Atlantic. In 2021, Prospect Magazine named him to its list of the world’s top 50 thinkers.

His current book, The Meritocracy Trap (Penguin Press, 2019), develops a sustained attack on American meritocracy. The book places meritocracy at the center of rising economic inequality and social and political dysfunction. The book takes up the law, economics, and politics of human capital to identify the mechanisms through which meritocracy breeds inequality and to expose the burdens that meritocratic inequality imposes on all who fall within meritocracy’s orbit.

Markovits is also working on a new book, tentatively called The Good Life after the Age of Growth.

After earning a B.A. in Mathematics, summa cum laude from Yale University, Markovits received a British Marshall Scholarship to study in England, where he was awarded an M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the L.S.E. and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. Markovits then returned to Yale to study law and, after clerking for the Honorable Guido Calabresi, joined the faculty at Yale.

Professor Jeremy Black

Professor Jeremy Black is a prolific lecturer and writer, the author of over 100 books. Many concern aspects of eighteenth century British, European and American political, diplomatic and military history. But he has also broadened his perspective, both temporally and geographically, and published on the history of the press, cartography, warfare, culture and on the nature and uses of history itself.

After graduating with a starred First from Cambridge, he undertook research at Oxford and has subsequently been Professor of History at the universities of Durham and Exeter.

Jeremy’s work adds up to the most sustained presentation of British history in recent decades. He is a major exponent of military, diplomatic and cartographic history and has been important in helping the British to look at their past, as well as in representing British history to foreign audiences.

Professor Constance de Font-Reaulx (University of Toronto)

Constance de Font-Réaulx is a scholar of environmental history and early modern France. She is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and holds her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University (2022). She was a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at the University of Toronto for two years (2022-2024).

Her research focuses on the commercialization and commodification of drinking water in early modern Paris. She examines debates over the governance of the supply of water when commercial and financial capitalism had begun transforming nature into a commodity. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Power of Water: The Politics of the Parisian Waterworks (1660-1850). Her work was published in peer-review journals and edited volumes. She is an assistant editor for the H-France Forum.

Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Education
PhD, Johns Hopkins University
MA, École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Dr. Patrick Griffin (University of Notre Dame)

Patrick Griffin is the Madden-Hennebry Family Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is also the Thomas Moore and Judy Livingston Director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. His work explores the intersection of colonial American and early modern Irish and British history. As such, it focuses on Atlantic-wide themes and dynamics. He has published work on the movement of peoples and cultures across the Atlantic Ocean, as well as the process of adaptation. He also examines the ways in which Ireland, Britain, and America were linked—and differed—during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has looked at revolution and rebellion, movement and migration, and colonization and violence in each society in comparative perspective. Prof. Griffin currently serves as director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.

Maryann Feldman (Arizona State University), Jason Jolley (Ohio University), and Neill Lane (local entrepreneur)

Maryann Feldman:

Maryann P. Feldman is the Watts Professor of Public Policy and Management at the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions at Arizona State University and research director at the Global Center for Technology Transfer.

Professor Feldman chairs the Policy Forum of the Science, Technology and Economic Policy Board of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, where she also chairs a congressional mandated assessment of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.

She is a senior fellow at Heartland Forward, a nonpartisan “think and do tank” focused on improving economic performance. Feldman serves on the advisory board of the Canadian Institute for Advance Research (CIFAR) global program on Innovation, Equity and the Future of Prosperity. She is a board member of the Ontario Brain Institute. Feldman is an editor of the journal Research Policy, the leading journal in the field of innovation studies.

Professor Feldman was a winner of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research for her contributions to the study of the geography of innovation, the commercialization of university research and the role of entrepreneurial activity in the formation of regional industry clusters. Feldman is a prolific and highly cited author. She received the Distinguished Scholar award from the Technology and Innovation Management division of the Academy of Management.

Her recent research focuses on place-based economic development and the factors that promote economic restructuring and resilience.

Jason Jolley:

G. Jason Jolley, Ph.D. serves as Interim Associate Vice President for Research and Creative Activity at Ohio University where he coordinates economic development activities across the university. In his faculty role, he serves as Professor of Rural Economic Development and MPA Director at Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service. He also directs the Center for Economic Development and Community Resilience. Prior to joining Ohio University in 2013, Dr. Jolley spent seven years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Kenan Institute/Kenan-Flagler Business School where he co-led the largest state sponsored study of the effectiveness of economic development incentives for the North Carolina General Assembly.

Dr. Jolley has served as principal investigator on over $10 million in sponsored research funding and co-led efforts to secure an additional $2 million in federal funding and $1 million in state funding for regional economic development partners. His portfolio includes funding from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, Appalachian Regional Commission, Small Business Administration, Ohio Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation, Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, and JobsOhio, among others. Dr. Jolley also leads Ohio University portion of the Ohio Economic Development Institute (OEDI), in partnership with the Ohio Economic Development Association (OEDA) and JobsOhio. OEDI provides state level certification to Ohio economic developers.

Neill Lane:

Neill Lane is a successful entrepreneur and start-up CEO. His currently an advisor, board member and angel investor.

He is a founding member of the Athens Ohio Investment Alliance, an angel investor group in Athens, Ohio and an investor member of Queen City Angels in Cincinnati, Ohio Neill currently serves as board chair of My Green Lab, a California not-for-profit that is the world’s leading organization establishing standards and practices for environmental sustainability in laboratories. My Green Lab presented at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP28, and its customers and sponsors include Agilent Technologies, Roche, Amgen, Astra Zeneca, Millipore Sigma and Thermo Fisher Scientific, amongst others.

He also serves on the boards of Impact Laboratories and Voxel Innovations. Impact Laboratories is a newly formed for-profit start-up, which will deliver My Green Labs laboratory certification and ACT product environmental impact labels. Voxel Innovations is an innovator in developing pulsed electrochemical machining technology to its fullest potential.

Neill was the founding CEO of Stirling Ultracold in Athens, Ohio. Under his leadership the company delivered the first environmentally friendly, energy efficient, ultra-low temperature cooling products to customers worldwide. Stirling Ultracold is now an award-winning premium brand; their technology and products have positively changed the entire industry’s approach to sustainable ultra-low freezers. Stirling Ultracold was the first ultra-low freezer brand to receive the ENERGY STAR rating. Neill led four rounds of fundraising as the company established cleantech manufacturing in Appalachian Ohio. Stirling Ultracold’s products played a key role in m-RNA Covid vaccine distribution. In May 2021, the company was acquired by BioLife Solutions (Nasdaq BLFS) in what is thought to be the largest ever Appalachian Ohio regional exit. Institutional investors included TechGrowth Ohio, a pre-seed fund focused on early stage, innovative technology companies, Advantage Capital, and the Ohio Innovation Fund.

During 2008 and 2009, Neill was a co-founder and president of Blight to Bright LLC, a developer of largescale solar installations, and an executive in residence with TechGrowth Ohio.

Previously Neill served for 10 years as CEO of Sunpower Inc in Athens, Ohio. Sunpower developed, manufactured, and licensed Stirling engines and coolers, as well as linear compressors, for applications including solar thermal electric power, household refrigeration, household micro combined heat and power, radioisotope space power and cryogenic refrigeration. Under his leadership the company established its cryocooler manufacturing capability. Licensees include LG Electronics; their class-leading refrigerators use a linear compressor developed with Sunpower. The company’s cryocooler was used by NASA’s Rhessi Program, which completed 16-years of successful operation in 2016. Sunpower was acquired by Ametek (NYSE AME) in 2009.

Earlier in his career he held several engineering leadership and teaching positions. He was born and grew up in Zimbabwe, and he has a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.