Directory

More than anything, the Kinder Institute is a vibrant, diverse community of scholars who share not only an academic interest in rigorously unpacking the complex history of constitutional democracy in the U.S. and around the globe but also a commitment to collective inquiry. Both in the classroom and beyond it, our undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty learn both alongside and from one another, and they do so with the kind of civility and interdisciplinary curiosity that is essential to generating innovative scholarship and engaging in productive discourse.

You can contact the Kinder Institute front desk with questions at, (573) 882-3330. For questions specifically regarding undergraduate programs, contact Dr. Thomas Kane, Director of Undergraduate Studies, at KaneTC@missouri.edu.

Use the tabs below to meet the people who make up the Kinder Institute.

Chris Deutsch

Chris Deutsch

PostDoctoral Fellows,

DPAA Research Partner Fellow, crdkf9@missouri.edu
Chris Deutsch is the University of Missouri DPAA Research Partner Fellow. He provides historical research support for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and the Agency’s mission “to provide the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel to their families and the nation.” He is working on a manuscript under advanced contract with the University of Nebraska Press, tentatively titled, “Beeftopia: The Red Meat Politics of Prosperity in Postwar America,” on the role of public policy and politics in the rise of beef production and consumption in the decades after World War II. The book will explore the government’s efforts to secure beef, which was a key metric of affluence and which Americans measured nightly on their dinner plates. He has previously taught history at the University of Missouri, including courses on food history, the 1980s, and the twentieth century. He earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in history at California State University, Sacramento, and a Ph.D. from at the University of Missouri.

Tara Ginnane

Tara Ginnane

PostDoctoral Fellows,

Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Thought & Constitutionalism, tginnane@missouri.edu
Tara Ginnane works in constitutional theory, political theory, and comparative constitutionalism. She received a BA from the University of Oxford, an LLM from the University of Chicago, a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and a certificate in French and European law from the University of Paris (Panthéon-Assas). 

Tara’s political theory research focuses on how transnational political participation affects the spatiality of democracy. She is also interested in how territory matters to political community. Her dissertation, “The National Membership Politics of External Voting,” proposes normative guidelines for external voting policies based on an original comparative empirical study of their relationship to national membership. Tara’s constitutional theory research focuses on the normative logics of constitutional structures and has been published in Polity.  

Ferris Lupino

Ferris Lupino

PostDoctoral Fellows,

Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Thought & Constitutionalism, falgk6@missouri.edu
Ferris Lupino holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Washington and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University. His manuscript project, American Stasis: Conflict, Order, and Leadership in Black Political Thought looks to the canon of black political thought to find ways of rethinking democratic politics and conflict and outlines how post-civil rights thinkers’ uses of classical materials provide alternatives to the assimilationist and separatist paradigms in US racial politics. From 2020-2021, he taught as a Lecturer at Seattle University. He joins the Kinder Institute as a Postdoctoral Fellow in American Political Thought and Constitutionalism.

Austin Stewart

Austin Stewart

PostDoctoral Fellows,

Postdoctoral Fellow in Political History, austin.stewart@missouri.edu
Austin Stewart holds a B.A. and M.A. in History from Cleveland State University and a Ph.D. in Early American History from Lehigh University. He previously served as a Visiting Professor of History and Native American Studies at Northland College in Wisconsin during the 2022-2023 academic year. His teaching interests center on courses in the history of the Atlantic World, Native history, the Revolutionary Era, the Early Republic, and the nineteenth-century American West. Austin’s current research focuses on Native migrations, territoriality, and settler colonialism in the early nineteenth-century West. He is interested in comparative legalities and constructions of property, sovereignty, and identity in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americas. He joins the Kinder Institute as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political History.