Chase Center Courses

• Section 10: Wednesday-Friday, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Jacob Hall
• Section 20: Tuesday-Thursday, 11:10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Faculty: TBD

Effective self-government has been the historical exception rather than the rule. This course surveys the origins, institutions, achievements and failures of past efforts at self-government. Students consider case studies from across two millennia to gain a better understanding of how notions of citizenship and justice have varied across time, culture, and historical context.

• Section 20: Wednesday-Friday, 9:35-10:55 a.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Jesse Smith
• Section 40: Tuesday-Thursday, 11:10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Faculty: TBD
• Section 50: Monday-Wednesday, 12:45-2:05 p.m. | Faculty: TBD
• Section 60: Monday-Wednesday, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Wes Siscoe
• Section 70: Tuesday-Thursday, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Laura Siscoe

What are the political and ethical principles of the Declaration of Independence, and how should they be put into practice? Students compare answers by social scientists, constitutional theorists, and partisans from across the political spectrum, to gain a better sense of what divides Americans, and what could unite them.

• Section 10: Tuesday-Thursday, 9:35-10:55 a.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Daniel Gullotta
• Section 20: Monday-Wednesday, 12:45-2:05 p.m. | Faculty: Post-Doctoral Scholar Frank Ngo
• Section 30: Tuesday-Thursday, 12:45-2:05 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Sabrina Little
• Section 40: Wednesday-Friday, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor David Little
• Section 50: Monday-Wednesday, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: TBD
• Section 60: Tuesday-Thursday, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Matthew Frakes

This course surveys the development of the American civic tradition by placing Alexis de Tocqueville's classic study Democracy in America into conversation with humanist philosophers, cultural or journalistic critics, and public policy practitioners who engaged key concepts from Tocqueville's work at different stages of American history. 

• Section 10: Tuesday-Thursday, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: Professor Christopher Green

This course surveys enduring debates within the American constitutional order. The course connects primary texts from the eras of the Founding and Reconstruction to subsequent debates regarding the construction of American law and society. Topics to be considered include the possibilities for constitutional amendment, and the constitutionality of college admissions policies.

Section 10: Tuesday-Thursday, 9:35-10:55 a.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Sabrina Little

The Declaration of Independence names the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right. This course introduces the tradition of inquiry on happiness and the good life that informed the American Founders, as well as accounts of happiness from contemporary social science. Considers obstacles to measuring happiness and explores why our intuitions about what will make us happy are often wrong.

Section 10: Monday-Wednesday, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: Professor Michael Clune

This course examines the privileged role creative writing has had in defining the terms of American citizenship. Proceeds through close reading of key works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to examine how writers have sought to define freedom and equality, shaping and transforming the American understanding of these ideals.

Section 20: Monday-Wednesday, 11:10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Brianna Frakes

This course surveys the evolution of citizenship in the United States from the Revolutionary War through the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Students consider how individuals and groups outside positions of formal political power worked to expand or restrict who could claim citizenship, with special attention to the relationship between constitutional law and civil society.

Section 10: Tuesday-Thursday, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor James Hooks

This course explores the interaction of Christianity with government and law from the Roman era to the present day, considering questions including: how has Christianity influenced ideas of law, civic virtue, and individual rights? Is there a connection between Christianity and governmental structures such as republicanism or monarchy? Is the United States a Christian nation, or a secular regime?

Section 10: Wednesday-Friday, 9:35-10:55 a.m. | Faculty: Lecturer David Little

In this course students survey classic and contemporary works of history, philosophy, religion, art, and literature that address the purposes of science, the meaning of health and wellbeing, and contemporary problems related to science, medicine, and technology.

Section 10: Tuesday-Thursday, 9:35-10:55 a.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Laura Siscoe

Does politics make people smarter or dumber? Students will leave this class with an increased ability to navigate cognitive and moral errors that corrupt political reasoning among citizens in diverse societies. Topics covered include the intersection of citizen identity and politics, the ethics of partisan loyalty, and the role of social groups in the formation of our individual political beliefs.

• Section 10: Monday, 2:15-5 p.m. | Faculty: TBD

This course introduces students to state constitutions and state courts as sources of legal authority, political conflict, and civic identity. State constitutional law offers an essential but often overlooked window onto topics including: constitutional interpretation; constitutional amendment; judicial appointments; federalism; popular sovereignty, and the protection of individual rights.

• Section 10: Wednesday-Friday, 11:10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Jacob Hall

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Law and Economics, which uses the economic way of thinking to develop an understanding of the law and the Anglo-American legal system. The course explores core topics in law (e.g. property, contracts, torts, crime), broader issues related to the judicial and legislative process, and constitutional political economy.

• Section 40: Tuesday-Thursday, 11:10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Matthew Frakes

This course surveys crises that have defined American presidential leadership. Students are introduced to the dual perspectives of the policymaker and the historian, using both as tools to understand how and why presidents have made deeply challenging decisions. Students will learn how citizens can fairly evaluate the decisions of leaders operating under conditions of complexity and uncertainty.

• Section 10: Tuesday-Thursday, 12:45-2:05 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Daniel Gullotta

This course examines the life and legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—theologian, pastor, resistance figure against the Nazi regime—through his writings alongside historical sources and scholarship. By situating Bonhoeffer within his context and the American cultural imagination, students will analyze how religion informs responsible leadership.

Section 10: Tuesday-Thursday, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor James Hooks

This course explores the interaction of Christianity with government and law from the Roman era to the present day, considering questions including: how has Christianity influenced ideas of law, civic virtue, and individual rights? Is there a connection between Christianity and governmental structures such as republicanism or monarchy? Is the United States a Christian nation, or a secular regime?

Section 10: Tuesday-Thursday, 9:35-10:55 a.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Laura Siscoe

Does politics make people smarter or dumber? Students will leave this class with an increased ability to navigate cognitive and moral errors that corrupt political reasoning among citizens in diverse societies. Topics covered include the intersection of citizen identity and politics, the ethics of partisan loyalty, and the role of social groups in the formation of our individual political beliefs.

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:45-2:05 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Jacob Hall and Assistant Professor James Hooks

Effective self-government has been the historical exception rather than the rule. The framers of the United States Constitution were acutely aware of the fragility of experiments with self-government. This course seeks to sharpen students’ awareness of that fragility by analyzing arguments and case studies that especially informed American framers’ thinking. Throughout the semester, students will survey the origins, institutions, achievements and failures of efforts at self-government. They will use both primary and secondary sources to gain a better understanding of how notions of citizenship and justice have varied across time, culture, and historical context within the Western Tradition. 

This course provides essential historical and intellectual context for understanding the American experiment. As such, it is inspired by and provides an updated version of the example of the historically sweeping, inter-disciplinary survey courses that were once a staple of the general education curriculum in higher education. This is not a course in general cultural literacy, however, but literacy in the specific puzzles that preoccupied early architects of the American civic tradition, and which provide essential shared foundations for more specialized study of the challenges of American civic life.

• Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:35-10:55 a.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Daniel Gullotta
• Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:20-3:40 p.m. | Faculty: Associate Professor of Teaching Paul Wilford
• Wednesdays and Fridays, 11:10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Matthew Frakes

This course introduces students to key episodes and cultural developments in American civic life––from the Colonial Era to the Founding, through the Civil War, and up to the present day. Our guide for understanding American citizens’ evolving engagement with their political society is one of the most influential books ever written about the United States: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. 

Tocqueville offers us a privileged lens into the evolution of American civic culture for several reasons. He visited the still-nascent Republic in 1831 with the specific intent of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of its new political order, liberal democracy. Tocqueville also strained to identify the civic foundations of America’s growing geopolitical power at a time when American civic norms were rapidly changing and hotly contested: Tocqueville witnessed and commented on the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the dispossession of American Indians, and the powerful role of religion in U.S. political culture. 

Students will not only spend the semester investigating Tocqueville’s writing but also learning about his character. Indeed, part of the reason he provides such valuable insight into America’s colorful civic life is because he bridged many political, geographic, and intellectual worlds himself. He was born into the French aristocracy and served in government after his country’s revolution, but he was never fully trusted by parties of either the revolutionary left or the counter-revolutionary right. His education in philosophy and theology deeply shaped his outlook, but his writings ended up setting a foundation for the social sciences and American understandings of political cultures;. And, though a proud Frenchman, his writing has been crucial to Americans’ self-understanding of their democratic tradition, quoted by nearly every U.S. President since World War Two. With Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as this course’s anchor, students will not only expand their understanding of American civic life as a cultural phenomenon but also reflect on how they can more ethically participate in it today. 

This course is structured thematically. Each week throughout the semester, students will spend their first class exploring how Tocqueville analyzes a central theme––for instance, the role of political parties in American democracy, the sources of its wealth and prosperity, the causes of the Civil War, and threats to democratic self-government. Then, during the second half of the week, students will explore how the same theme is addressed by a wide range of classical and contemporary authors from the American civic tradition. This approach will expose students to competing political, philosophic, and methodological perspectives that they could explore more intensely in an upper-level course. 

This course structure will also allow students to combine depth (slowly working through one primary text, giving a particular author’s point of view the careful, nuanced attention that any critical assessment requires) with breadth(surveying a range of powerful alternatives, both old and new). Moreover, such a structure will enable us to cover substantial ground––putting different periods of American history into conversation with one another and discovering crucial points of continuity and change between them. 

• Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:45-2:05 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Brianna Frakes

This course introduces students to debates that have shaped the American civic tradition. The course is anchored by primary texts from the Founding period which set the parameters for subsequent arguments within and about American civic life. These sources are also examined through their application to contemporary constitutional debates and landmark Supreme Court cases. 

Students will learn how contemporary civic dilemmas and solutions continue to center around foundational debates and early decisions that defined the American constitutional order, and how those debates continue to inform discussions in contemporary scholarship, court cases, and public policy dilemmas. 

Topical dilemmas to be considered include principles of justice, as applied to college admissions policy; the legal definition of citizenship, including birthright citizenship; and constitutional amendment procedures.  

Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:35-10:55 a.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Sabrina Little

The Declaration of Independence names “the pursuit of happiness” as an unalienable right, alongside life and liberty. This course introduces students to the tradition of inquiry on happiness and the good life that informed the American Founders, with special attention paid to classical and early modern thinkers. 

It investigates the place that virtue and duty have in a good life, and it asks what role, if any, a government should play in supporting the happiness of its citizens. This course explores the difference among hedonic, eudaimonic, and desire-satisfaction accounts of happiness and asks how they present in American civic life. 

The semester concludes with the dominant contemporary account of happiness from the social sciences as subjective well-being. It addresses where suffering fits into a good life, and it explores why our intuitions about what will make us happy are often wrong.  

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Faculty: Lecturer Heather Wilford and Associate Professor of Teaching Paul Wilford

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Laura Siscoe

Does politics make people smarter or dumber? Students will leave this class with an increased ability to navigate cognitive and moral errors that corrupt political reasoning among citizens in diverse societies. Topics covered include the intersection of citizen identity and politics, the ethics of partisan loyalty, and the role of social groups in the formation of our individual political beliefs. 

If you hope to be a fully engaged and effective citizen in an increasingly diverse society, you must critically reflect on your habits of political reasoning. Good political reasoning is inextricably linked to the pursuit of justice both locally and globally, as well as to individual and societal-level flourishing. 

In the past decade there has been a lot of attention paid to such subjects as political polarization, echo chambers, declining trust amongst citizens, identity politics, and the role of religion in government. And for good reason. In recent years, the United States (along with many other liberal democracies) has become increasingly politically fractured, with a rising percentage of Americans stating that those who disagree politically cannot even agree on basic, non-political facts about the world. 

There is also strong evidence that a majority of citizens across a smattering of democratic societies wish to see substantial changes to their nation’s current governmental system. All of this is set against a backdrop of rising sociological diversity and increasing pluralism about what an ideally just society looks like. It is widely agreed that our public political discourse, institutions, and systems have become increasingly fractured and dysfunctional in a myriad of ways. 

Alongside much popular-level speculation and theorizing, there has also been an explosion of academic work on the topic of political reasoning. This is a large umbrella term, under which falls work in a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, social psychology, religion, critical theory, and political science. 

The common thread of academic work under the banner of political reasoning is that it pertains to how it is that you do and should reason about matters of political relevance. One of the key challenges to creating a more just world in the midst of increasing conditions of sociological diversity is that many people disagree over what an ideally just world looks like. Given this plurality of ideas about justice, citizens are often confused about how to engage matters of political and moral significance, as well as how to effectively and respectively communicate with their neighbors about such topics. 

This course is designed to fill in this gap, enabling students to engage in critical and logical thinking by diving into cutting-edge philosophical work on the topic of political reasoning. They will also engage various historically influential texts and synthesize various themes pertinent to the topic of political reasoning that have been addressed in various ways throughout intellectual history. Students will implement multiple methodological approaches to the subject matter of political reasoning, borrowing methodologies from various disciplines. 

This 3000-level class will familiarize you with some of the best and most recent scholarly contributions on this subject, featuring a number of important texts and debates from various intellectual disciplines––as well as some popular-level work. Readings draw from analytic philosophy (including pieces from Michael Huemer, Michael Hannon, C. Thi Nguyen, Regina Rini, etc.), political science (Christopher H. Achen, Larry M. Bartels, etc.), social psychology (Cass R. Sunstein), and critical theory (Charles Mills). 

This course goes beyond what is required in introductory level courses, as it requires reading a number of difficult historical texts as well as a good amount of work that is considered on the cutting edge of political epistemology. The study of political epistemology as it relates to political reasoning prompts students to analyze the concepts of citizenship, justice, and diversity at a more advanced and in-depth level than in the Foundations component. It does this by requiring a more in-depth and complex synthesis of various methodological approaches and a more diverse array of author viewpoints, including influential viewpoints from critical theory, the history of philosophy, social psychology, and democratic theory. 

This course is interdisciplinary in design, encouraging students to draw connections between their major/minor field of study, other courses they have taken, and even their own real-world experiences as it pertains to citizenship for a just and diverse world. There is an emphasis on guided classroom discussions on difficult subject matter, helping students draw out these potential connections between differing conceptions of citizenship, justice, and diversity more explicitly. 

Topics covered include the intersection of citizen identity and politics, the ethics of partisan loyalty, and the role of social groups in the formation of our individual political beliefs. Through a combination of readings, lectures, discussions, and structured debates, you will leave this class with an increased ability to navigate many of the cognitive and moral errors that serve to corrupt your political reasoning as a citizen in a diverse society. Put differently, you will better understand how politics breaks your brain and what you can do about it.

Mondays 2:15-5 p.m. | Faculty: Assistant Professor Luke Perez and Professor Christopher Green

This transdisciplinary course draws on historical and contemporary case studies in leadership from various civic arenas: politics (local, state, and federal), religion, education, business, and non-profit. Students will explore: What ideas and philosophical premises underlie healthy, or unhealthy, civic leadership? How do leaders navigate the tension between tradition and change? How have American leaders successfully channeled American ideals of equality, individualism, and freedom into constructive, community-minded civic ends?

What does it mean to lead with purpose in a complex world?

This interdisciplinary seminar invites students to explore the lives and leadership styles of prominent American figures who have shaped civic, cultural, and institutional life. Each week, students will engage with real-world case studies and leadership models across law, politics, religion, education, and business—learning how individuals navigate tradition, challenge norms, and foster meaningful change.

Confirmed Guest Leaders Include

• Bishop Earl Fernandes – Catholic leader and advocate for moral clarity in public life
• Rabbi Lewis Kamrass – Champion of interfaith dialogue and civic responsibility
• Senator Rob Portman – Former U.S. Senator with a legacy of bipartisan leadership
• Representative Beryl Brown Piccolantonio – State and local government leader focused on equity and community engagement
• Justice Melody Stewart – Ohio Supreme Court Justice and trailblazer in legal ethics and education
• President Gordon Gee – Visionary university president and higher education reformer
• Phil Derrow – Business executive and civic entrepreneur committed to workforce development
• Senator Eric Kearney – Legislative leader and civic innovator advancing equity and economic opportunity

Course Highlights

• Weekly discussions on leadership, identity, and institutional transformation
• Bi-weekly student presentations connecting theory to practice
• Honors students complete a CRIG Project (Creativity, Resilience, Independence, Grit)

This course is ideal for students interested in public service, law, education, business, nonprofit leadership, or anyone seeking to understand how personal agency intersects with civic life.