President: Ryan R. Holston

Vice-President: William F. Byrne

Treasurer: Luke C. Sheahan

Secretary: Jay Schalin

Board of Directors

William F. Byrne
St. John’s University

William F. Byrne is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at St. John’s University (NY), where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in political theory and American politics.  A former Congressional staff member, Dr. Byrne also spent several years in the private sector before entering academia.  He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from The Catholic University of America, an M.B.A. from George Mason University, and a B.A. in History from the University of Pennsylvania.  An Associate Editor of the journal Humanitas, he is the author of Edmund Burke for Our Time:  Moral Imagination, Meaning, and Politics, as well as of numerous scholarly articles.

Lowell Gustafson
Villanova University

Lowell Gustafson is professor of political science at Villanova University.  He is the author of The Sovereignty Dispute over the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands, contributing editor of Thucydides’s Theory of International Relations: A Lasting Possession, and other books and articles.  He also currently serves as president of the International Big History Association.

Ryan R. Holston
Virginia Military Institute

Ryan R. Holston is Associate Professor at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, VA, where he teaches political theory.  He is also an Associate Editor at the journal Humanitas.  Dr. Holston received his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University, his M.Sc. from The London School of Economics and Political Science, and his B.A. from Dickinson College.  His published work appears in journals such as Harvard Theological Review, Telos, Modern Age, History of Political Thought, Political Science Reviewer, and Humanitas.  He is currently writing a monograph whose working title is Tradition and the Deliberative Turn and a co-edited volume entitled The Historical Mind:  Confronting the Post-Democratic Age.

Claes G. Ryn
Catholic University of America

Claes G. Ryn is Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of America (C.U.A.), where he was Chairman of his department for six years. He has taught also at Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, and Louisiana State University. A naturalized American, he was a doctoral and undergraduate student at Uppsala University in his native Sweden. His teaching and research have been predominantly philosophical but interdisciplinary, combining study of ethics, culture, epistemology, and the history of Western political thought with study of American political thought, U.S. foreign policy, and international relations. His many books include America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire; A Common Human Ground: Universality and Particularity in a Multicultural Age; Democracy and the Ethical Life: A Philosophy of Politics and Community; Will, Imagination and Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality; and the recent novel A Desperate Man, a moral-political drama. In 2011 Ryn received the C.U.A. Provost’s award for most distinguished Achievement in Research. In 1992 The Graduate Students Association at C.U.A. named him Outstanding Graduate Professor at C.U.A. Ryn is Chairman and co-founder of the National Humanities Institute, which studies the moral and cultural bases of civilization. He is Editor of the scholarly journal Humanitas. He was President of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters, of which he was also co-founder, and President of the Philadelphia Society. He has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, and Asia, especially China. A frequent visitor to China, he gave the Distinguished Foreign Scholar Lectures at Peking University in 2000. In 2012 he was named Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal University. Three of his books and many of his articles have been published in China. He is an Honorary Member of Heimdal at Uppsala University, Sweden’s oldest and largest student association.

Jay Schalin
The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Luke C. Sheahan
Wellesley College

Luke C. Sheahan is Associate Director and Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Freedom Project, an academic institute at Wellesley College. He researches the intersection of First Amendment rights and political theory. Sheahan’s scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in Humanitas, Anamnesis, and The Journal of Value Inquiry and he has lectured widely on religious liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. He is author of the forthcoming book Why Associations Matter: The Individual, the State, and the Freedom of Associations. Sheahan is also working on a manuscript tentatively titled Pluralism and Toleration: Difference, Justice, and the Social Group.

Sheahan received a PhD and MA in political theory from the Catholic University of America and a B.S. in political science from the Honors College at Oregon State University. From 2016-2018 he was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. He is a five-time recipient of the Humane Studies Fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies, a 2014 recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), and a 2015-2016 recipient of a dissertation research fellowship from the Catholic University of America.

James Matthew Wilson
Villanova University

James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor of Religion and Literature in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University.  An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from art, ethics, and politics, to meter and poetic form, from the importance of local culture to the nature of truth, goodness, and beauty.

Wilson is also a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, National Review, and The American Conservative.  He has published seven books, including The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (CUA, 2017), the major critical study, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (Wiseblood, 2015), a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things, and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014).  Wilson is the Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine, and also serves on the boards of several learned journals and societies.

Wilson was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A.), the University of Massachusetts (M.A.), and the University of Notre Dame (M.F.A., Ph.D.), where he subsequently held a Sorin Research Fellowship.  He joined the faculty of Villanova in 2008.