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Stephen W. Sawyer is the Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History and Director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies. Sawyer came to AUP from the University of Chicago center in Paris and the Ecole Normale Supérieure-rue d’Ulm 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. A specialist in political history and theory, Sawyer earned his PhD at the University of Chicago. He has served on the editorial board of the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales and as the Associate Editor for its English version since 2012. In 2014-15, he was named inaugural Neubauer Collegium Fellow at the University of Chicago. Appointed Directeur de publications of The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville in 2014, he 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 Spring 2020 he was invited Kratter Visiting Professor to the History Department at Stanford University.

The core of his project articulates a history and theory of democracy as a mode of popular magistrature, administration and public regulation. The project advances along two dimensions: first, a critical intellectual history featuring a close rereading of key texts and authors that may be read surprisingly differently when one places democracy – rather than liberalism or republicanism – at the center of our histories of political modernity. Second, the project turns on a rediscovery and re-prioritization of the variety of substantive and concrete activities, programs, and policies that have constituted democratic action. The first volume of this project was published in 2018 under the title Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840-1880 (University of Chicago Press). It was followed by a monograph entitled La contingence et le pouvoir (Armand Colin, 2018). This book, focusing on the highly contentious figure Adolphe Thiers, further elaborated the project’s methodology, “a pragmatic history of the political.” He is currently preparing the second volume on Regulation and the Birth of the Democratic Social Contract, 1810-1850. The project as a whole self-consciously builds on late twentieth-century, primarily French, democratic and social theory. Sawyer has explored this work and its legacy in a series of edited volumes, including: In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Antitotalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France since 1950 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2016); Pierre Rosanvallon's Political Thought (Bielefeld University Press, 2018); Michel Foucault, Neoliberalism and Beyond (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); and his translation of Michel Foucault's lectures Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2014). The international, historical and theoretical dimensions of this project have been explicitly elaborated in a series of co-edited volumes with his colleagues William Novak and James Sparrow, including Beyond Stateless Democracy (Tocqueville Review, Spring 2015), A Comparative History of the French and American Democratic States (Tocqueville Review, 2012) and Boundaries of the State in US History (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Alongside these 9 volumes, the project includes over sixty articles, book chapters and reviews, in six countries and leading journals including The American Historical Review, Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales, The Journal of Modern History, Modern Intellectual History, The European History Quarterly and The Tocqueville Review.

Interview with Stephen Sawyer

Julian Culp is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Program Coordinator for Philosophy, and Fellow of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris. Previously, he was a lecturer in philosophy and political theory at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, where he received his Habilitation and PhD in philosophy. Culp held postdoctoral fellowships from the University of Toronto and the Catholic University of Louvain, and he spent research stays at Duke and Princeton universities.

Culp is the author of Global Justice and Development (Palgrave, 2014) and Democratic Education in a Globalized World (Routledge, 2019), as well as of numerous articles in journals such as Philosophy Compass, Theory and Research in Education, Third World Quarterly and Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Democratic Education (CUP, 2023), the journal Analyse & Kritik – Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory (De Gruyter) and the book series Philosophy of Education – Debates and Constellations (Brill and Mentis).

Interview with Julian Culp

Professor Miranda Spieler joined the faculty of the American University of Paris in 2012. She holds an AB from Harvard College, where she studied the history and literature of France and Germany. In graduate school at Columbia University in New York, she worked as assistant to the writer Susan Sontag, taught Columbia's flagship course, Contemporary Civilization, and served as lecturer in Harvard's History and Literature program. After graduate school, she joined the department of history at the University of Arizona, where she received tenure in 2011.

She is an historian of France and the overseas empire and writes about law and imperial violence. She is especially interested in using archives to recover the elusive and fragmentary traces of marginal people, including slaves, former slaves, immigrants, prisoners, and vagabonds in France and in former colonies. Her research for Empire and Underworld led her to archival depositories in France and in French Guiana (where she spent six months).

Her new book project focuses on the story of people of color living in Paris and in the port cities of France during the eighteenth century.

Roman Zinigrad is Assistant Professor of Law at the American University of Paris and is the coordinator of the AUP History, Law & Society undergraduate program. He is a Fellow of the AUP Center for Critical Democracy Studies (CCDS) and a Fellow of the Sciences Po Law School Human Rights Clinic. 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, constitutional law, and legal aspects of the French approach to radical violence.

Interview with Roman Zinigrad

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.

Her scholarly interests primarily revolve around political and moral philosophy, as she continues focusing on questions that have inspired her since her doctoral thesis: What is the need to make compassion a political concept? How can we broaden the scope of our collective political attention? By virtue of what can we reinterpret the ethico-political heritage in the light of a new questioning of the meaning of the relationship to the other?  These questions are also pathways of future research that she aims to direct towards formulating viable connections between care ethics and critical theory. Zarić developed these academic endeavors with postdoctoral research conducted at the Center for Advanced Studies in Southeast Europe, University of Rijeka, Croatia, where she also organized an international conference in collaboration with AUP and SciencesPo Paris: “Re-inventing/reconstructing cosmopolitanism in contested spaces and post-conflict zones”. In collaboration with Cynthia Fleury and Pauline Bégué, she organized and led the seminar "Care and Compassion: The Individual, the Hospital Institution, and the Polis" at the Philosophy Chair of the Hôtel-Dieu, Paris.

Zarić's scholarly contributions extend to her role as the co-author of "Care and Compassion: A New Paradigm for Political Philosophy?" (Hermann Edition, 2021) and as the co-editor of the collected volume "Pierre Bourdieu: Radical Thought and Praxis" (IFDT Edition, Belgrade, 2023), as well as co-editor of a book of interviews "Refusing to Be Silent: Engaged Conversations with Leading Intellectuals" (Mimesis International, 2023). She is currently working on the first monograph dedicated to Nancy Fraser's oeuvre, which is to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024. Her multilingual academic prowess is showcased by numerous articles in English, Serbo-Croatian, and French. She is the editorial board member of Novi Plamen, an intellectual magazine of the region of former Yugoslavia.

Her teaching experience spans across multiple esteemed institutions, including the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm, Paris), the Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade, Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) Paris, the Catholic Institute of Paris (ICP), Paris 8 University, and the The American University of Paris (AUP).

For an interview with Zaric, see https://www.les-philosophes.fr/agora/zona-zaric.html

Nathanaël Colin-Jaeger is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy, with a strong interest in Economics and the History of ideas.  His main research interests lie in Political Philosophy (in particular, markets and democracy, value pluralism) and Philosophy of Economics (Decision theory, social choice, competitive markets). He is also interested in the history of these domains, more particularly the history of liberalism and neo-liberalism. 

In September 2022, he completed his Ph.D. dissertation in Political Philosophy at the ENS de Lyon in France: Governing with rules, political and legal neoliberal thinking, which focused on the contribution of Hayek, Lippmann, Buchanan, and Posner. This work was conducted partly at Duke University (Center for the History of Political Economy), where he stayed for one year.  In this dissertation, he studied neoliberalism as a political theory mainly interested in the problem of the design of good rules to promote competitive markets. 

During a postdoc in Fribourg after his Ph.D, he extended his the question of the recognition of complexity and value pluralism for contemporary societies. This led me him work on deliberative democracy as a way to cope with complexity and pluralism, and on polycentricity and federalism. He also partly work on topics related to behavioral economics. 

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Dr. Hannah Davis Taieb is a Clinical Fellow at the Center for Critical Democracy Studies. She holds PhD in anthropology and is the founder and leader of AUP’s innovative prison education workshops, where students learn from and with people who are currently incarcerated, and participate in workshops led and co-led by teachers, activists, and creators who have experienced incarceration. Taieb first established a collaboration with La Santé prison in 2019 and continues to organize student exchanges with detainees at La Santé in the Spring and Summer semesters.

Dr. Taieb is primarily interested in developing and using egalitarian pedagogies that create connection and generative exchange across difference. She has sought out these approaches to learning in such contexts as her recent co-taught AUP course on Coexistence and Religion, which fostered discussion on diverse approaches to religion, secularism and spirituality.

After graduating from New York University in 1992, Taieb taught in the Global Communications Program at AUP, then went on to serve as a program director at the Council on International Educational Exchange’s study program in Paris. In classes, community service projects, and faculty seminars, Taieb developed innovative and dialogue-based programs, with topics including French and US contrasting approaches to laicity, chaplaincy, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and “disability in situation.” Her interest in bringing together social actors in unusual ways led her to design the “Diplomats of Diversity” program, in which youth from the Paris immigrant Goutte d’Or district visited US high schools and universities. Taieb also designed and led a study trip to US prison and chaplaincy training programs in which French prison officials, wardens, and chaplains visited their US counterparts, culminating in a discussion with incarcerated people at Graterford prison in Pennsylvania. Her writings during this period brought out the subtle ways students handle emotions arising through crossing borders, and proposed ways that international educators can promote critical and dialogic approaches.

In 2019, Taieb received training from Walls to Bridges, a Canadian NGO and an important innovator in prison education. This has in turn inspired her to develop the current AUP – la Santé prison education workshop approach. In 2020, working with an international group of educators, activists, writers and students, Taieb founded the non-profit Dialogue & Transformation (www.dialoguetransformation.com) which is developing workshops led and co-led by people who have experienced incarceration. As a Fellow at the CCDS, Taieb intends to continue this focus on engaging students in innovative forms of creativity and learning, with people whose paths they might not otherwise have crossed. Throughout her career Taieb has prioritized collaborative practice, and at AUP has developed projects and taught in tandem with colleagues including Waddick Doyle, Michelle Kuo, Albert Wu, and Roman Zinigrad.

To deepen her practice of leading individuals in groups across and through difference, Taieb is currently training as a gestalt practitioner.

Shane McLorrain is a Visiting Research Analyst with the Center for Critical Democracy Studies and an Editor for Tocqueville 21. His contributions focus on geopolitics, international political economy and French politics. He is also the creator, host and producer of the Tocqueville 21 Podcast.

Prior to joining the CCDS, Shane was an analyst and consultant with PR firm Fabriq, where he worked with industry leaders in fields such as cybersecurity and Machine Learning. In 2019, he founded Zeitgeist Zeitung, now the Concorde International Review, where he and a small team undertook a collaborative commentary project on issues of money, politics, and culture.

He holds an MSc in History of International Relations from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in History from the American University of Paris

Lucille (Lucie) Reed is an honours undergraduate student at AUP pursuing a dual degree in International and Comparative Politics & Middle East Pluralities. Having grown up in Germany and California, Lucie is a dual citizen of Finland and the United States. An ardent football fan - Go Liverpool! -  her interests span the fields of political analysis, philosophy, and world literary classics. Lucie envisions a career incorporating her passion for feminist causes and human rights studies with international law, and she plans to pursue a master's degree post-graduation, with as much field experience as possible.

Reem Rajab is an undergraduate student from London who holds dual citizenship in the United Kingdom and France. She is working towards a Bachelor's degree with honours at AUP, majoring in Philosophy with a minor in politics. Her academic interests include axiology, political philosophy, and political theory, which she will further explore in her work on Care Ethics and Democratic Theory for the CCDS. Following her undergraduate studies, Reem aspires to pursue a Master's degree in Philosophy.

Alessia Lavorato is an undergraduate student from the United States studying politics, history, and government at AUP. She grew up in Southern California and loves living in Paris and being immersed in French culture. She has prior experience working as an intern for the United States House of Representatives and plans to pursue a JD/MBA degree. Alessia hopes to pursue a legal career advising government officials and agencies.