George Washington Forum News and Events

Professor Jennifer Frey (University of Virginia)

Professor Keely Smith (Tulane University)

The Muscogee (hereafter spelled Mvskoke to reflect traditional spelling conventions) language is an endangered Indigenous language with fewer than 400 speakers who live primarily in Oklahoma and the American Southeast. Over the past thirty years, Mvskoke-speaking activists and scholars have worked to revitalize the language using historical Mvskoke language texts, but scholars have yet to explore the contested histories of these texts, their Mvskoke creators and contributors, and what they can reveal about Mvskoke sovereignty. In this 250^th anniversary year of the American Revolution, this talk will explore the implications of U.S. nationhood for Mvskoke language and sovereignty. It will reveal the story of the Mvskoke communities who were responsible for the transcription and adoption of the written Mvskoke language from early partnerships between Mvskoke interpreters and Euro-American settlers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the Mvskoke people who wrote in their own language to warn their communities about U.S. plans for allotment and statehood at the turn of the twentieth century. This project combs Mvskoke and English language archives to argue that contests over the written language sculpted diverse Mvskoke communities that sustained Mvskoke sovereignty despite threatening U.S. efforts to “civilize,” dispossess, and assimilate Native peoples.

Keely Smith is Assistant Professor of Native American History in the Department of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at Tulane University. She graduated with her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 2024. Her research focuses on Native nations and languages in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Native South. Smith’s current book project, Relations in Writing: Contests Over Mvskoke Language, Literacy, and Communities, 1715-1907, tells the story of the Mvskoke communities who were responsible for the transcription and adoption of the written Mvskoke language from the Yamasee War to Oklahoma statehood. Smith’s other work includes a chapter in the forthcoming edited collection Gender in the Native South: A Reinterpretation of Women, Men, and Two-Spirit Peoples Before 1850 in production by University of Nebraska Press. In addition to academic writing and teaching, Smith is the administrative assistant for the Southeastern Indigenous Language Network, a community for Indigenous language teachers and speakers from the Gulf South.

Professor Elizabeth Anderson (University of Michigan)

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 (Yale Law School)

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 Maria Pia Paganelli (Trinity University)

Maria Pia Paganelli is a Professor of Economics at Trinity University, San Antonio, TX. She works on Adam Smith, David Hume, and 18th century monetary theories. She wrote The Routledge Guidebook to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (Routledge 2020), and co-edited the Oxford Handbook on Adam Smith (OUP 2013) and Adam Smith and Rousseau (EUP 2018).

Dr. Paganelli is the recipient of two Fulbright fellowships. She served as the Vice President of the History of Economics Society and as the book review editor for the Journal of the History of Economic Thought. She is a former President of the International Adam Smith Society, and of the History of Economics Society

Prof. Vincent Phillip Munoz (University of Notre Dame)

Vincent Phillip Muñoz is the Tocqueville Professor of Political Science and Concurrent Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. He is also the Founding Director of ND’s Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government. Under his leadership the programs have raised over $20,000,000 in grants, gifts, and pledges.

Dr. Muñoz writes and teaches across the fields of constitutional law, American politics, and political philosophy with a focus on religious liberty and the American Founding. He won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to support his most recent book, Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses (2022), published by the University of Chicago Press. Articles related the project have appeared in American Political Science Review, The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Notre Dame Law Review, American Political Thought, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Journal of Constitutional Law.

Dr. Muñoz’s first book, God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson (Cambridge University Press, 2009) won the Hubert Morken Award from the American Political Science Association for the best publication on religion and politics in 2009 and 2010. His First Amendment church-state case reader, Religious Liberty and the American Supreme Court: The Essential Cases and Documents (Rowman & Littlefield) was first published in 2013 (revised edition, 2015) and is being used at Notre Dame and other leading universities. In 2019, he joined the editorial team of American Constitutional Law (11th edition, Routledge, 2020), the leading constitutional law casebooks designed for undergraduate instruction. His scholarship has been cited numerous times in church-state Supreme Court opinions, most recently by Justice Alito in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021) and by both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas in Espinoza v. Montana (2020).

Dr. Muñoz is a noted expert on the political philosophy of the American Founding and, in particular, James Madison. His most recent publications have explored the Founders’ understanding of religious establishments and (with his former student, Kate Hardiman Rhodes, how the modern Supreme Court has reconceived what an establishment of religion is.

An award-winning teacher and a popular lecturer, Dr. Muñoz has spoken at over 100 colleges and universities in the past several years. He received his B.A. at Claremont McKenna College, his M.A. at Boston College, and his Ph.D. at Claremont Graduate School.

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.