Kinder Institute Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy, Assistant Professor of Political Science, jcikuta@missouri.edu
Jennie Ikuta is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Truman School of Government & Public Affairs and an Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the Kinder Institute. Born in San Diego and raised in Yokohama, Japan, she returned to the United States as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago (2007) and completed her Ph.D. in political theory at Brown University (2014).

As a political theorist, Ikuta’s research interests center on the role of moral psychology in politics, especially in 19th- and 20th-century political thought. Her first book, Contesting Conformity: Democracy and the Paradox of Political Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the thought of Tocqueville, Mill, and Nietzsche in order to investigate the notion of nonconformity and its relationship to modern democracy. Articles drawn from this project have been published in Constellations (2017) and Philosophy & Social Criticism (2015).

Since then, she has turned her attention to the kinds of motivations necessary for generating social change in contexts of historical injustice. This is the focus of her second book project, White Losses: Moral Psychology and the Demands of Racial Justice, which is under advance contract at Oxford University Press. This project employs the thought of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin—in conjunction with analyses of popular forms of American liberalism and contemporary political theory—to illuminate the psychological transformations required by members of historically dominant groups for the sake of a more egalitarian society. Articles drawn from this project have been published in The Journal of Politics (2021) and Polity (2022); another is forthcoming in Political Theory.

Kinder Institute Assistant Teaching Professor of Constitutional Democracy, Assistant Teaching Professor of Political Science, hernandezrk@missouri.edu
Rodolfo (Rudy) Hernandez is a Kinder Institute Assistant Teaching Professor of Constitutional Democracy and Assistant Teaching Professor of Political Science. His research focuses on political theory and American political development, and his dissertation considers the political economy of Abraham Lincoln’s thought, especially as it relates to the principle of equality expressed by the Declaration of Independence. Recently his work has appeared in The Political Science Reviewer.  He frequently teaches American Government, American Political Thought, and Race and the American Story. Dr. Hernandez received his Ph.D. in Political Theory from Louisiana State University (2017) and his B.A. from St. John’s College (Annapolis, 1999). He previously taught as a Visiting Instructor at Louisiana Tech University and as a Senior Lecturer at Texas State University, and he served from 2018-20 as a Kinder Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Thought & Constitutionalism. He also has prior government experience, including having been in AmeriCorps, having worked as a tax examiner in the U.S. Treasury Department, and eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve.

 

Kinder Institute Chair of Early American History, Professor of History, pasleyj@missouri.edu
Jeffrey L. Pasley is Professor of History and Journalism, Frederick A. Middlebush Chair of History, and the Kinder Institute Chair in of Early American History. A graduate of Carleton College, he was a reporter-researcher for The New Republic and a speechwriter for Al Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign before entering academia. He completed his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University and taught at Florida State University before coming to Missouri in 1999. His teaching and research focus on American political culture between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Professor Pasley is co-editor of Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (2004) and author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001) and The First Presidential Contest: The Election of 1796 and the Beginnings of American Democracy (2013), the latter of which was named a finalist for the prestigious George Washington Book Prize.

Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy, Professor of History, Kinder Institute Director, sextonj@missouri.edu
Jay Sexton is the Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy, Professor of History, and Director of the Kinder Institute. A native of Salina, Kansas, Sexton returned to the Midwest to the University of Missouri in 2016 after spending the better part of two decades at Oxford University in England. He started in Oxford as a grad student Marshall Scholar and worked his way up to being Director of the Rothermere American Institute (RAI) and, upon his departure, being elected a Distinguished Fellow of the RAI and an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Sexton specializes in the political and economic history of the nineteenth century. His research situates the United States in its international context, particularly as it related to the dominant global structure of the era, the British Empire. His most recent book, A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018), argues that international forces shaped the course of U.S. history during its greatest moments of transformative change.

His other books include Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 (Oxford, 2005; 2nd ed. 2014) and The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2011). He also has published four major collaborative projects: The Global Lincoln (co-edited with Richard Carwardine, Oxford, 2011); Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding to the Age of Terrorism (co-edited with Ian Tyrrell, Cornell, 2015); Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (co-edited with Kristin Hoganson, Duke 2020); and, also co-edited with Kristin Hoganson, The Cambridge History of America and the World: Vol. 2, 1820-1900 (Cambridge, 2021).

Sexton enjoys working with enterprising students, undergrad or grad, who set their own intellectual agenda. When he is not reading or talking history, he is cheering for KC sports teams and following British politics.

.

Associate Professor of Law and Constitutional Democracy, conklinc@missouri.edu
Carli N. Conklin is an Associate Professor at University of Missouri School of Law, Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the Kinder Institute, and Senior Fellow in the School of Law’s Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution. She earned her J.D./M.A. and Ph.D. in American Legal History from the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on arbitration, rights dialogues, and legal philosophy in early America. Prof. Conklin’s scholarship has been published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Legal History, the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution, Washington Jurisprudence Law Review, and the University of Missouri’s Journal of Dispute Resolution. She is an invited contributor to Discussions in Dispute Resolution, Volume I:  The Foundational Articles (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Discussions in Dispute Resolution, Volume II: The Coming of Age (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2025). Prof. Conklin is a past recipient of the Missouri Lawyers’ Weekly Women’s Justice Award (Legal Scholar category) and the University of Missouri School of Law’s Shook, Hardy, & Bacon, LLC Excellence in Research Award. She was awarded a national CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award from the Association of College & Research Libraries for her book The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era:  An Intellectual History (University of Missouri Press Studies in Constitutional Democracy series, 2019). Prof. Conklin teaches courses in lawyering, dispute resolution, and American legal history at the School of Law and the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and courses in intellectual and legal history at the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy and Honors College.

Kinder Institute Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy, Assistant Professor of History, reichardta@missouri.edu
Alec Zuercher Reichardt received a Ph.D. at Yale University and joined the Kinder Institute faculty in Fall 2018 as an Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy and an Assistant Professor of History, after spending a year as a junior visiting fellow at the Center for Humanities & Information at the Pennsylvania State University. Prof. Reichardt’s research revolves around 18th century European and Indigenous empires in North America and the Atlantic World, with a project currently in the works that examines the contest for the American Interior in the decades before the American Revolution and maps the development of communications infrastructure over the long Seven Years’ War. Prof. Reichardt’s next project will turn toward the spatial politics of native and Euro-American transportation landscapes, from the colonial period through the rise of the early American state. ​

Kinder Institute Professor of Constitutional Democracy, Professor of Political Science, dow@missouri.edu
Jay Dow is Professor of Political Science and 2017-2020 Frederick A. Middlebush Chair in Political Science. Before coming to the University of Missouri, he earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Dow’s research focuses on voting and elections, which he approaches from the public choice tradition in political science, as reflected in his recent book, Electing the House: The Adoption and Performance of the Single-Member District Electoral System (University Press of Kansas, March 2017). Professor Dow regularly teaches courses on American government, parties and elections, and American political thought, as well as the “Constitutional Debates” course for the Kinder Institute’s Honors College series, and he also organizes the Jefferson Book Club, an extracurricular undergraduate reading group that meets monthly to discuss great books in the classical liberal tradition.