Faculty & Staff

George Thomas Ph.D.

Director of the Salvatori Center
Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions

Professor Thomas has authored books such as The (Un)Written Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2021), The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Madisonian Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), and has co-authored American Constitutional Law: Essays, Cases, and Comparative Notes (West Academic, 2018), as well as numerous scholarly articles on American Constitutionalism.

Valerie Cubias

Program Coordinator of the Salvatori Center

Valerie Cubias serves as Program Coordinator for the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College, where she tracks and coordinates campus events, leads communications and media, and helps advance student-led projects and collaborative initiatives across departments, institutes, and student organizations.

With a B.A. in Relational and Organizational Communication and a minor in Spanish, Valerie draws on her academic background and experience in higher education administration to
provide strategic support, organize programming, and foster connections across the campus community. She is passionate about helping students develop their ideas, engage effectively, and contribute to a vibrant, inclusive college environment.

Valerie approaches her work with warmth and intention, guided by a commitment to elevating diverse voices and strengthening collaboration across the campus.

Mark Blitz

Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy

Former Director of the Salvatori Center, he served during the Reagan administration as Associate Director of the United States Information Agency and as a senior professional member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He has also been Vice President of the Hudson Institute and has taught Political Theory at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on several boards, including the Society of Scholars at Princeton University, the Children’s Education Center of Claremont, and the Delba Winthrop Prize committee.

Nicholas Buccola

Professor of Government

Professor Buccola's teaching and research are in the area of American political thought. He is the author of The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America and The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty. He is the editor of The Essential Douglass: Writings and Speeches and Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy. His scholarly essays have appeared in a wide range of academic journals, including The Review of Politics and American Political Thought. His public intellectual work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, and Dissent. He is currently completing a monograph on the idea of freedom in the civil rights and conservative movements, and co-editing The Princeton History of American Political Thought.

Zachary Courser

Associate Professor of the Practice

Zachary Courser is Director of CMC's Policy Lab, a Fellow with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC, and a Professor of Government. His research agenda focuses on public policy, political parties, democracy, Congress, and populism. He is an expert on congressionally directed spending, having co-authored two reports with leading DC think tanks on the subject, and is currently working on a book manuscript on the subject. Prof. Courser has led several research partnerships for CMC’s Policy Lab with a variety of think tanks, including the Bipartisan Policy Center, RAND Corporation, American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution. He has also organized international conferences on topics such as populism and contemporary challenges to western liberalism from Russia.

Ioannis Evrigenis

Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics and Woolley Director of the Open Academy

Ioannis (Yannis) Evrigenis is the Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics and Woolley Director of The Open Academy at Claremont McKenna College.  His research centers on natural law and rights, psychology, rhetoric, and sovereignty in the history of political thought. He is the author of Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes's State of Nature (2014) and of articles and chapters on a wide range of issues and thinkers in political theory, as well as co-editor of Johann Gottfried Herder's Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings (2004). Evrigenis received the Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science for his book Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (2008), as well as the RSA/TCP Article Prize for Digital Renaissance Research, from the Renaissance Society of America, for his article “Digital Tools and the History of Political Thought: The Case of Jean Bodin.” He is currently working on a new translation of Bodin's Six Books on the Commonwealth.

Evrigenis holds a BA from Grinnell College, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and AM and PhD degrees from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation was awarded the Herrnstein Prize. He has received grants and fellowships from Fulbright, Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Earhart Foundation, among others, as well as five Certificates of Distinction in Teaching from Harvard University's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.

Michael Fortner

Associate Professor of Government

Professor Fortner earned his B.A. from Emory Univeristy and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. His areas of expertise include American culture and politics, crime, criminal justice history, inequality, public policy, public administration, and race and ethnicity.

Seth Lobis

Associate Professor of Literature

Professor Lobis earned his B.A. and his Ph.D. from Yale. He published “The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in 17th Century England” in 2015. His areas of expertise include Milton, Renaissance literature, and Shakespeare.

Susan J. McWilliams

Professor of Government

Previously as a Professor of Politics at Pomona College, McWilliams has won the Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching three times and is an elected member of the Executive Council of the American Political Science Association. She has received the Graves Award in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Quarry Farm Fellowship from the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies, and other awards.

James H. Nichols

Emeritus Jules L. Whitehill Professor of Humanism & Ethics

Professor Nichols is also Avery Fellow at Claremont Graduate University. Educated at Yale and Cornell, he has taught at McMaster University, the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, and Yale University, and spent a year working at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington as Associate Director of the Division of General Programs.

Emily Pears

Associate Professor of Government

Professor Pears earned her B.A. in government from Claremont McKenna College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the development of patriotic attachments and constitutional union in the American Founding and early 19th century, and she is broadly interested in questions of nationalism and political culture in American political thought.

John Pitney

Roy P. Crocker Professor of Politics

Professor Pitney earned his B.A. from Union College and his M.A., M.Phil, and Ph.D. from Yale. His areas of expertise include American politics, California politics, Congress, electoral politics, the Internet & politics, media politics, national elections, political advertising, political parties, the presidency, and public policy.

Jon Shields

Professor of Government

Professor Shields teaches courses on contentious issues such as policing, free speech, and American culture wars. Previously, he taught at the University of Colorado and Cornell University. He is also a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance. He's currently co-authoring a book with Stephanie Muravchik on Liz Cheney’s Wyoming.