Roberto Breña holds a Ph. D. in Political Science from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is professor and researcher at the Centro de Estudios Internacionales of El Colegio de México (Colmex). He is the author of the book El primer liberalismo español y los procesos de emancipación de América, 1808-1824 (Una revisión historiográfica del liberalismo hispánico), published by Colmex in 2006 and the editor of the book En el umbral de las revoluciones hispánicas: el bienio 1808-1810, that was co-edited in 2010 by Colmex and the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales de Madrid. His most recent book is El imperio de las circunstancias (2012), a study of political and intellectual history on the Spanish American independence movements and the Spanish liberal revolution of 1808-14.

Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Stanley Kelley Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching of Sociology at Princeton. He was previously President and Director of the London School of Economics, President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), President of the Berggruen Institute, and variously a professor, dean, department chair, and institute director at UNC-Chapel Hill, Columbia, and NYU. Calhoun’s newest book is Degenerations of Democracy (Harvard 2022, co-authored with Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor). His earlier books have included The Question of Class Struggle; Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China; Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference; Nations Matter: Citizenship, Solidarity and the Cosmopolitan Dream; and The Roots of Radicalism. He is the author of numerous articles on technology and social change, community, humanitarian emergencies, and universities. He edited the ASA Centennial history of Sociology in America and he joined with Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann and Georgi Derlugian to publish Does Capitalism Have a Future? More information may be found at https://calhoun.faculty.asu.edu.

Chiara Cordelli is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and affiliated faculty in Philosophy. Her main research fields are social and political philosophy, with a particular focus on questions at the intersection of political economy and democratic theory. She is the author of The Privatized State (Princeton University Press, 2020), which provides a normative critique of privatization, grounded on a Kantian theory of the democratic state, and which develops a democratic theory of public administration, including a defense of a partially democratized bureaucracy. Cordelli’s current book project aims to develop a normative critique of capitalism and a defense of financial democracy. The book provides novel accounts of the distinctiveness of capitalism as an economic system; the core wrong of capitalism; the point of democratic socialism; and its institutional demands. The book treats capitalism’s distinctive mode of monetary valuation and investment as its core site of analysis; defends a specific account of social alienation, different from exploitation or domination, as the distinctive wrong of capitalism; argues that the point of socialism should include a process of reconciliation, and presents a normative case for the planning and democratization of investment.

Blake Emerson is Professor of Law and a Professor of Political Science (view CV). Prior to joining UCLA Law, he was a Research Fellow at the Administrative Conference of the United States in Washington, D.C. His primary research interests lie in administrative law, structural constitutional law, and political theory. In 2021, he received the Association of American Law Schools, Administrative Law Section’s Emerging Scholar Award. In spring of 2024, he was a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In 2025, he received the Early Career Scholars Medal from the American Law Institute. Emerson’s research examines the normative and historical foundations of American public law. He draws on resources from political theory and American political development to understand the structure and purpose of the regulatory state. He studies questions such as: What role have federal government agencies played in interpreting and implementing civil rights and other fundamental public values? How can legal doctrine ensure that agencies address such significant policy issues in a reasoned and inclusive fashion? In what ways have the diverse institutions of the American state realized, or failed to live up to, democratic principles? Emerson received his B.A. magna cum laude with Highest Honors from Williams College, his Ph.D. with Honors from Yale University, and his J.D. with Honors from Yale Law School.

Harris Feinsod is a literary and cultural historian of the United States, Latin America, and the Atlantic world. His teaching and research encompass poetry, modernism and the avant-garde in Europe and the hemispheric Americas, and transnational studies. His recent work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of oceans, coasts, and working waterfronts under conditions of globalization and environmental instability. This work is reflected by a multidisciplinary research group, the Tidewater Initiative, which he directs. Feinsod’s first book, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford, hardcover 2017/paperback 2019), offers a detailed literary history of relations among poets in the US and Latin America amidst the political transformations of the mid-twentieth century. He is now at work on “Into Steam: The Worlds of Modernism at Sea.” A global account of transoceanic and dockside poetry, narrative fiction, visual art, and radical history in the early twentieth century, “Into Steam” charts modernist culture as viewed from its industrializing seaways. These projects were supported by fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center, and the National Humanities Center.

Dilip Gaonkar is Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Director of Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University. He is also the Director of Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly research network concerned with global issues. He was closely associated with the journal, Public Culture, serving as the Executive Editor (2000-2009) and as Editor (2009-2011). Gaonkar has two sets of scholarly interests: rhetoric as an intellectual tradition, both its ancient roots and its contemporary mutations; and, global modernities and their impact on the political. He has published numerous essays on rhetoric, including “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science” that was published along with ten critical responses to the essay in a book, Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, edited by Alan G. Gross and William Keith (1996). Gaonkar has edited a series books on global cultural politics: Globalizing American Studies (with Brian Edwards, 2010), Alternative Modernities (2001), and Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (1995). He has also edited several special issues of journals: Laclau’s On Populist Reason (with Robert Hariman, for Cultural Studies, 2012), Cultures of Democracy (for Public Culture, 2007), Commitments in a Post-Foundational World (with Keith Topper, 2005), Technologies of Public Persuasion (with Elizabeth Povinelli, 2003), and New Imaginaries (with Benjamin Lee, 2002). He is currently working on a book manuscript on Modernity, Democracy and the Politics of Disorder.

Chris Havasy is an Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University Law. His primary area of research is the relationships between political institutions and citizens, and the ramifications of those relationships on the separation of powers.  His research and teaching interests are in administrative law, constitutional law, legislation, legal history, and statutory interpretation.  He has additional interests in law and political economy, law and democracy, torts, corporate governance, and legal philosophy. His current projects examine how to evaluate conflicts between different social justice claims in public law; how to properly structure interest group lobbying; the intellectual history of administrative law; and the use of political theory in constitutional interpretation.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the California Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review (twice), UC Davis Law Review, and Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. He was previously a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law and an Assistant Professor at Penn State Dickinson Law.

Professor Harsin arrived at AUP in 2003, after having taught at Northeastern University and, earlier, worked as a music and culture journalist and dj. Current director of AUP's research Center for Media, Communication & Global Change, Harsin is a critical scholar who has published seminal work on the media and communicative forms and processes of what is popularly called “post-truth politics,” such as “fake news,” conspiracy theory, rumor, lying, and disinformation. His research especially emphasizes critical cultural aspects of  gender, dis-/trust, emotion, and cognition, in the digital attention economy. His work theorizes, critiques and empirically analyzes communication and culture dynamics between professional and amateur-citizen political communicators, journalists, and social movements. Professor Harsin is the former chair of the Philosophy, Theory & Critique research division of the International Communication Association. His edited book, journal issues, and own peer-reviewed research has been published widely in journals such as Communication, Culture & Critique, International Journal of Communication, and French Politics, Culture & Society. He is the recipient of the 2022 International Award for Excellence for Information, Medium, and Society—The Publishing Studies Research Network—for his article “Post-truth Reflections on Public Origins and Functions of Publishing” (2021). He presents peer-reviewed research at professional conferences such as the International Communication Associaion. Professor Harsin is currently preparing a book manuscript that critically examines a renewed academic and popular fascination with "information" in a new cultural context of digital dystopia.

Myriam Hunter-Henin is a Professor of Comparative Law and Law & Religion at UCL Laws. Her research addresses the interaction and tensions between Law and Religion in a comparative perspective. It also examines the interactions between human rights, constitutional law and normative conceptions of democracy, with a focus on education, employment and family law. After graduating in Law both in France and England, she completed her PhD doctorate at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris, France) on personal status, leading to a monograph (Pour une redefinition du statut personnel, PUAM, 2004, awarded the Dennery Prize), Myriam has mainly taught on comparative law, family law, law & religion and human rights, first at Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris, France) where she was a research and teaching fellow and subsequently at the Faculty of Laws at University College London, where she was consecutively appointed as lecturer, Senior lecturer, Reader and since October 2021, Professor. She was also invited to Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli (LUISS) (Rome, Italy) to teach on the Summer 2020 Programme on Constitutional Law (moved to on-line setting), to UCLouvain as visiting Professor in May 2022 and to over 60 talks and keynote lectures in prestigious Universities and settings, such as the French Conseil d’Etat (2016).

Jeff King is the Deputy Director of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism (GCDC) and a Professor of Law at UCL Laws, specialising in UK and comparative public law and constitutional theory. His works include Judging Social Rights (CUP 2012), which won the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, and co-edited works such as The Cambridge Handbook of Deliberative Constitutionalism (CUP 2018), Foundations and Future of Public Law (OUP 2020), The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory (CUP 2025) and the forthcoming Comparing Covid Laws: A Critical Global Survey (OUP 2025).  As Co-Principal Investigator of the Lex-Atlas: Covid-19 project, he was general Co-Editor of The Oxford Compendium of National Legal Responses to Covid-19, an encyclopaedic comparative study of over 50 national legal responses to Covid-19.  King was the recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2018, and served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Constitution Committee and Research Director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law before becoming Deputy Director of the GCDC. His key area of interest at the moment is the theory and practice of the rule of law, with a special interest in emergencies in comparative public law.

Liam Mayes is a lecturer in the School of Humanities. He teaches courses on political theory, media studies, and poverty studies in the interdisciplinary programs of Politics, Law and Social Thought (PLST) and Cinema and Media Studies (CMST). Dr. Mayes's research explores issues of poverty, democracy, and the changing dynamics of social movements and protests in North America. His current book project, titled The Broken Hermeneutics of American Poverty, examines ethnographic accounts of poverty and argues that the emergence of the American affluent society in the twentieth century shifted the foundations on which poverty, inequality, and the divisions between rich and poor and between elites and non-elites are understood. In a forthcoming manuscript, Dr. Mayes takes a global, comparative approach to analyze the 2022 Freedom Convoy, a right-wing protest that took place on Canadian highways and in front of the Canadian Parliament. In addition to his position at Rice, Dr. Mayes is the Assistant Director of the Center for Transcultural Studies (Chicago and New York). He has organized over 50 national and international conferences and symposia, most recently developing and teaching interdisciplinary graduate courses in globalization and democratic theory at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

Joana Mendes is Professor of European Public Law at the Luxembourg Centre for European Law, University of Luxembourg, a position she has held since 2025. She holds a law degree and a master’s in public law from the University of Coimbra (Portugal), and a doctorate from the European University Institute (Italy). Prior to her current role, she was Professor of Comparative and Administrative Law and Head of the Doctoral School at the University of Luxembourg. She was previously Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where she also acted as PhD Dean. Her academic experience includes a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship at Yale Law School (2014) and a research stay at the London School of Economics (2025). 

financed by the EU Commission, as part of the LAC-EU doctoral network. After living in Italy, the United States and Germany, he moved to England where he obtained a Bachelor's degree in Politics and International Relations from the University of Manchester and a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He is also a Central America Researcher for ACLED (the Armed Conflict Location Event Database), and in the past he has collaborated with IARI (Istituto Analisi Relazioni Internazionali), an Italian think-tank and geopolitical academy as Editor-in-chief of the Latin American Desk.

Gazela Pudar Draško is a political sociologist, a Senior Research Associate, and currently the Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, which is widely recognized for its commitment to engaged scholarship. She is a member of the Coordinating Board of the Regional Network of Advanced Studies Centers in Southeast Europe, further promoting collaboration within the academic community. Her research interests include deliberative democracy, participatory democratic innovations, social movements, and gender studies. Gazela’s work is motivated by a dedication to evidence-based social sciences and advancing participatory governance practices.

Professor Stephen Ramos is an international scholar of urban planning and design. His research focuses on port cities, energy transition, logistics, and planning history. Ramos’s first book, Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography (Ashgate, 2010) received wide acclaim for its contribution to infrastructure studies, and it continues to be an important reference for Gulf urban research. Ramos received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where he co-founded the journal New Geographies. He was also co-editor of Infrastructure Sustainability and Design, as part of the GSD’s Zoftnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure. The book brought together top international engineering and planning firms and thinkers to develop evaluative criteria for a sustainability framework for large technical systems. Ramos’s interest in the port-city relationship continued in his work on the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project. With over $100,000 research support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ramos explored the Savannah River corridor and the competing economic and social claims on the fragile coastal and riparian ecologies.

Stephen W. Sawyer is the Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History and director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris (AUP). Sawyer came to AUP from the University of Chicago Center in Paris and the École Normale Supérieure where he was lecturer in the final years of his dissertation. After receiving fellowships from the EHESS, Fulbright, and Sciences Po, Sawyer served as part-time assistant to Pierre Rosanvallon at the Collège de France. He has served on the editorial board of the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales and as associate editor for its English version since 2012. In 2014-15, he was named inaugural Neubauer Collegium Fellow at the University of Chicago. In 2014, he was appointed publications director of The Tocqueville Review and subsequently founded the online platform Tocqueville21 in 2017. In 2018-2019, he was named research fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 2020, 2022, and 2023 Sawyer participated in three European Horizon grants, serving as a principal investigator on projects focusing on challenges to contemporary democracy. The core of his multi-volume project articulates a history and theory of democracy as a mode of popular magistrature, administration and public regulation. Sawyer returned to Stanford as the Kratter Visiting Professor in European History in 2022. 

Zona Zarić, philosopher and feminist, is our newest member of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies (CCDS) joining as a post-doctoral fellow to work on our Horizon Europe grant OppAttune. Zarić is presently Lecturer at The American University of Paris (AUP) and serves as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Though only recently receiving her PhD in Philosophy from the Ecole normale supérieure rue d’Ulm, her notable achievements also include a J.D. in law from the University of Belgrade, and a M.A. in International Affairs from the American University of Paris. In her doctoral thesis, Zaric focused on the concept of compassion and its strategic political application. She highlights the moral and political significance of compassion in response to the challenges posed by a prevailing culture of rampant individualism. In so doing, she paves the way for a deparochialization of theory, challenging previously understudied forms of inequality, in particular those related to tolerance and the implicit hierarchy between the one who tolerates and the one who is tolerated.

Dr. Roman Zinigrad is Assistant Professor of Law at the American University of Paris. He is the coordinator of the History, Law & Society undergraduate program, and Fellow at the AUP Center for Critical Democracy Studies (CCDS). Roman is also a co-PI of the CO3 project (Continuous Construction of Resilient Social Contracts Through Societal Transformations) of the Horizon Europe program. He specializes in constitutional law and theory, comparative constitutional law, and law and education. Roman’s research interests include law and religion, international human rights law, and children’s rights. He has published on the right to education, parental rights, free speech (and humor), freedom of religion, and legal aspects of the French approach to radical violence. Roman received his J.S.D. degree from Yale Law School. He holds an LL.B. and M.A. (Phil.) from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, as well as an LL.M. from Yale Law School. Before his graduate studies, he clerked with Honorable Justice Salim Joubran at the Israel Supreme Court.