Kinder Institute Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy, Associate Professor of Political Science, jcikuta@missouri.edu
Jennie C. Ikuta is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. As a political theorist, she works in modern political theory (especially 19th and 20th century thought), with a focus on moral psychology, race, and democratic theory. For the 2025-26 academic year, she is a Racial Justice Fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at Harvard Kennedy School.

She is the author of Contesting Conformity: Democracy and the Paradox of Political Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2020), and her articles have appeared in journals such as The Journal of Politics, Political Theory, and Polity. Currently, she is completing a second book project, White Losses: Moral Psychology and the Demands of Racial Justice (under advance contract, Oxford University Press). This project has been supported by the National Humanities Center; the Bogliasco Foundation; the W.E.B. Du Bois Center; Magdalen College at the University of Oxford; and the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities.

She holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago (2007) and a Ph.D. from Brown University (2014). Born in San Diego and raised in Yokohama, she calls both California and Japan home.

Kinder Institute Associate Teaching Professor of Constitutional Democracy, Associate Teaching Professor of Political Science, hernandezrk@missouri.edu
Rodolfo (Rudy) Hernandez is a Kinder Institute Associate Teaching Professor of Constitutional Democracy and Associate 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 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 at the University of Missouri. He is also currently serving as President of the Society of American Foreign Relations (2025–2026).

A native of Salina, Kansas, Sexton returned to the Midwest in 2016 after spending the better part of two decades at Oxford University. He began there as a Marshall Scholar and rose to become Director of the Rothermere American Institute (RAI). Upon his departure, he was 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, situating the United States within its international context, especially in relation to the British Empire. In A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018), he argues that moments of transformative change in U.S. history have been shaped by international forces.

His other works 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 has co-edited several collaborative volumes: The Global Lincoln (with Richard Carwardine), Empire’s Twin (with Ian Tyrrell), Crossing Empires (with Kristin Hoganson), and The Cambridge History of America in the World: Vol. 2 (also with Hoganson).

Sexton is currently at work on three projects: a book on how steam infrastructure shaped U.S. relations with the world in the second half of the nineteenth century; a new study of the Kansas–Missouri borderlands; and a collaborative volume (co-edited with Billy Coleman and Lily Santoro) offering global perspectives on the United States at its 250th anniversary.

Sexton enjoys working with enterprising students, undergraduate or graduate, who set their own intellectual agendas. When not reading or talking history, he cheers for Kansas City sports teams and keeps a close eye on British politics.

 

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Associate Professor of Law and Constitutional Democracy, conklinc@missouri.edu
Carli N. Conklin is an associate professor at University of Missouri School of Law, an associate professor of constitutional democracy and former associate director at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, and director of the School of Law’s Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution. She earned her JD/MA and PhD in American Legal History from the University of Virginia, where she received the School of Law’s John and Madeleine Traynor prize for outstanding written work.

Prof. Conklin’s research focuses on early American legal and intellectual history. Her 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 the Oxford University Press Discussions in Dispute Resolution book series, including Volume I: The Foundational Articles (OUP 2021), and Volume II: The Coming of Age (OUP 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). Her follow-up work, The Pursuit of Happiness Beyond the Founding, is forthcoming from the University of Missouri Press in late 2026.

Prof. Conklin teaches courses in lawyering, dispute resolution, and American legal history at the School of Law and courses in early American intellectual and legal history at the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy and Honors College. She is a past recipient of the Kappa Alpha Theta Outstanding Faculty Award (one of ten awardees chosen nationally), the School of Law Board of Advocates Faculty Achievement Award (student-selected), and has been student-selected as a University of Missouri Friars Chapter of Mortar Board Faculty Honor Tap and two-time Mizzou ’39 Faculty Mentor.

 

Kinder Institute Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy, Associate Professor of History, reichardta@missouri.edu
Alec Zuercher Reichardt received a Ph.D. at Yale University and currently serves as an Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy and an Assistant Professor of History, joining the Kinder Institute in 2018 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, as seen in the 2025 University of Pennsylvania Press monograph, Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis, which 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. Professor Dow joined the University of Missouri faculty in 1992. 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, with his current research centered on the development of United States electoral institutions and processes. This is reflected in his Electing the House: The Adoption and Performance of the Single-Member District Electoral System (University Press of Kansas, 2017) and The First Elections: The Rise of Electoral Democracy in the Early American Republic (University Press of Kansas, 2026). Professor Dow regularly teaches courses on American government, parties and elections, and the “Constitutional Debates” course for the Kinder Institute’s Honors College series. He also serves as co-editor for the University of Missouri Press Studies in Constitutional Democracy series.