Professor, Truman School of Government & Public Affairs, endersby@missouri.edu
James Endersby (Professor) has been with the Department of Political Science since 1991. He received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Texas and specializes in American politics and government, political behavior (voting and elections), formal political theory, and research methods. Endersby served as the director of Canadian Studies at the University of Missouri and was past president of the Southwestern Political Science Association (2015-2016) and the Midwest Association for Canadian Studies (2007-2009).

Associate Professor, Department of History, karthasi@missouri.edu
Ilyana Karthas joined the MU history faculty after teaching for three years at McGill University in both the History Department and Women’s Studies Program. She teaches courses in Modern European intellectual and cultural history, specializing in 19th- and 20th- century France. Her research interests focus on the development of national identity, modern aesthetics, and ideologies of gender. Professor Karthas also teaches courses as part of the Gender Concentration, and she is an Affiliate Faculty member of both the Women’s and Gender Studies Department and the Kinder Institute. In 2010-2011, she served as the first Scholar’s Chair offered by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies in which she awarded a research stipend, delivered a public lecture, and taught a seminar in the WGST Department. In 2013, she was awarded the Maxine Christopher Shutz Award for Distinguished Teaching & Lecture and, in 2020, she was awarded the Alumnae Anniversary Award for Excellence in Teaching. She has been invited to participate in public lectures at the National WWI Museum in Kansas City.

 

Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History and Black Studies, fergusd@missouri.edu
Devin Fergus is the Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor of History and Black Studies. His research focuses on political economy, policy, and inequality in modern America. Professor Fergus’s most recent book, Land of the Fee (Oxford, 2018), explores the hidden costs of rising financial fees at home, school, work, and transportation on wealth and mobility in modern America. A much-anticipated work, Land of the Fee has been called one of the five best books for understanding capitalism today by The Nation. His current research project examines white-collar crime and the racial wealth gap. He is also author of Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, which was named a Choice Outstanding Book Title in 2010.

Fergus is guest editor of the special issue Banking without Borders: Culture and Credit in the New Financial World for Kalfou, a journal published by Temple University Press. This special issue examines the impact of four decades of financial deregulation in the US on vulnerable populations, which has increasingly affected the middle class. He has written widely on policy, political economy, and inequality for the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Guardian, among other outlets. Along with Louis Hyman, Bethany Moreton, and Julia Ott, Professor Fergus is also editor of the Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism book series published by Columbia University Press.

Professor Fergus has worked closely with several national policy organizations (e.g., Demos, Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative, the Center for Global Policy Solutions, and Prosperity Now) and has presented research to a number of federal entities, including the US Treasury, US Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Special Master (Kenneth Feinberg) for TARP Executive Compensation. Professor Fergus received his PhD in American history from Columbia University.

Professor and Chair, Department of Ancient Mediterranean Studies, troutd@missouri.edu
Dennis Trout is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Missouri. Before coming to MU in 2000, he was Associate Professor of Classics at Tufts University. He received his Ph.D. in Ancient History from Duke University in 1989. His research focuses on the period of Late Antiquity and engages material and visual evidence as well as literary sources. He has been President of the North American Patristics Society and is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation. He is the author of Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems (University of California Press, 1999) and Damasus of Rome: The Epigraphic Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is also interested in ancient political thought and practice, and he teaches a course on Political Thought in Classical and Christian Antiquity for the Kinder Institute’s Minor and Certificate in American Constitutional Democracy.

R.B. Price and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor Emeritus, MU School of Law, esbeckc@missouri.edu
Carl H. Esbeck joined the faculty of the University of Missouri School of Law in 1981 and currently serves as the R.B. Price Professor Emeritus and Isabelle Wade & Paul C. Lyda Professor of Law Emeritus. He received his Juris Doctor magna cum laude in 1974 from Cornell University, where he was on the board of editors of the Cornell Law Review. Prof. Esbeck held a judicial clerkship with the Honorable Howard C. Bratton, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in New Mexico, and, from 1975-81, he practiced law in the Albuquerque firm of Rodey, Dickason, Sloan, Akin & Robb, where he was an equity partner when he left. Prof. Esbeck has published widely in the area of religious liberty and church-state relations, and he is recognized as the progenitor of “charitable choice,” an integral part of the 1996 Federal Welfare Reform Act, and later applied to all federal social-service grant programs via the faith-based initiative under Presidents Biden, Obama, and Bush. In addition, he has taken the lead in recognizing that the modern U.S. Supreme Court has applied the Establishment Clause not as a personal right, but as a structural limit on the government’s authority in explicitly religious matters. While on leave from 1999 to 2002, Prof. Esbeck directed the Center for Law & Religious Freedom (CLRF) at the Christian Legal Society and then served as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. While directing the CLRF, he was a central part of the congressional advocacy behind the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). While at the Department of Justice, one of his duties was to direct a task force to remove barriers to the equal-treatment of faith-based organizations applying for social-service grants. Prof. Esbeck’s most recent book is Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Disestablishment in the New American States, 1776-1833, published by University of Missouri Press in 2019 as part of the Kinder Institute’s Studies in Constitutional Democracy series. At MU, he taught courses on Civil Procedure, Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations, Federal Civil Rights Litigation, and Constitutional Law.

Associate Professor, Truman School of Government & Public Affairs, kisidab@missouri.edu
Brian Kisida is an Assistant Professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri who focuses on education policy, experimental design, and causal inference. The dominant theme of his research focuses on identifying effective educational options and experiences for at-risk students that can close achievement gaps, experience gaps, and attainment gaps. His research has examined the broad educational benefits of school partnerships with cultural institutions and community arts organizations, teacher diversity, school integration, and urban school choice. His academic publications include articles in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Sociology of Education, Educational Researcher, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, Economics of Education Review, and Policy Studies Journal. He has also co-authored three congressionally mandated experimental evaluation reports for the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. His work has been cited in congressional testimony before the U.S. House and Senate, and it has appeared in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN.

Bill Horner is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Teaching Professor in the Department of Political Science. He studied Radio, Television, and Film as an undergraduate at Northwestern University before completing graduate degrees in Political Science at Arizona State University (M.A.) and the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D.). He is the author of Showdown in the Show-Me State (2005) and Ohio’s Kingmaker: Mark Hanna, Man and Myth (2010), and Saturday Night Live and the 1976 Presidential Election (2018), with MU Chair of Theatre Heather Carver. In addition, he is the co-author, with MU Professor of Political Science James Endersby, of Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation, the first book published on the Kinder Institute’s Studies in Constitutional Democracy series with University of Missouri Press. Since arriving at the University of Missouri, Professor Horner has twice been awarded the Purple Chalk Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education and has also received the prestigious William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence and the Chancellor’s Excellence Award for Lifetime Achievement in Advising for his work with Pi Sigma Alpha, the Political Science Department’s honors organization.