The Kinder Institute Panel: Pursuing Happiness In Troubled Times
We are proud to continue our on-going partnership with the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. Every year we partner with the Kinder folks to put on a panel which speaks to a subject matter which speaks to their mission and purpose.
This April we are thrilled to be presenting: “Pursuing Happiness in Trouble Times - Lessons from the Founders and the Philosophers.” The political theorists and historians on the panel will consider the ways and means of being ourselves and thinking democratically in times of rapid change and polarized opinions. America has always struggled with the tension between the rights and ambitions of individuals and society’s need for some degree of cooperation and harmony. This panel explores how the founders and other thinkers have tried to resolve these tensions and keep our democracy in balance. It promises to be a stimulating and memorable conversation!
This year’s participants are Carli Conklin, Jennie Ikuta, Daniel Mandell, and Aurelian Craiutu.
Carli Conklin
Carli Conklin is an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri School of Law and Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. Her teaching and research focuses on early American legal and intellectual history. She completed her B.S. in English and M.A. in Education at Truman State University before going on to study law and history through the University of Virginia’s joint J.D./M.A. program in American legal history. Prof. Conklin returned to the University of Virginia to complete her Ph.D. in History, with an emphasis on early American legal history. Her book, The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History, was published in 2019 through the Kinder Institute’s Studies in Constitutional Democracy monograph series with the University of Missouri Press.
Jennie Ikuta
Jennie Ikuta is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tulsa. Born in California and raised in Yokohama, Japan, she returned to the United States as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, followed by a PhD in political theory at Brown. Contesting Conformity: Democracy and the Paradox of Political Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2020) is her first book. Beginning in Fall 2020, she will become an Assistant Professor of Political Science and the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Daniel Mandell
Daniel Mandell came to Truman State’s history department in July 1999 after a childhood in California, graduate studies (and marriage) in Virginia, assorted jobs (and two sons) in the Boston area, and various temporary teaching positions around the country. Before The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600-1870, he wrote two dozen articles and six books on indigenous peoples in New England, including Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880 (2008), which in 2008 received the award for best book on American cultural history from the Organization of American Historians. Mandell has received various research fellowships, including long-term funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society, and last year was the Distinguished Research Fellow at the Kinder Institute at Mizzou.
Aurelian Craiutu is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. Craiutu’s research interests include French political and social thought (Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Constant, Madame de Staël, Guizot, Aron), political ideologies (liberalism, conservatism) as well as theories of transition to democracy and democratic consolidation (mostly Central and Eastern Europe). He is the author and editor of several books on modern political thought. His two most recent books are A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830 (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Professor Craiutu’s next book, Letters to a Young Radical: How to Be a Moderate is under contract and will be published by Cambridge University Press.