Civitas Institute Faculty Fellows

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  Charity-Joy Acchiardo

  Charity-Joy Acchiardo is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute and Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the faculty lead for UT’s OnRamps microeconomics course for high school students and is director of the Economic Education and Financial Literacy program, both joint projects of the Civitas Institute and the Department of Economics. She is an Economic Educator Fellow at the Fraser Institute, Canada’s top-ranked think tank, and has served as the Executive Director of the Journal of Economics Teaching. Her websites econkahoots.com and econshark.com are dedicated to making the economics classroom more engaging. Professor Acchiardo’s passion is sharing her joy about economics with others, and she is a frequent speaker, both domestically and internationally, at workshops for educators and students. She completed her Ph.D. in Economics at George Mason University.

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  Daniel Bonevac

  Daniel Bonevac is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute and Professor of Philosophy and Human Dimensions of Organizations at the The University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches and does research in logic and ethics, especially organizational ethics. His book Reduction in the Abstract Sciences received the Johnsonian Prize from The Journal of Philosophy. His other books include Deduction (Blackwell), Simple Logic (Oxford), Worldly Wisdom (Mayfield), and Historical Dictionary of Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield). Among his edited volumes are Today’s Moral Issues (McGraw-Hill, seven editions) and World Philosophy (Oxford, with Stephen Phillips). Professor Bonevac’s articles have appeared in such journals as Philosophical Review, Mind, Noûs, The Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Synthese, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Ethics, Philosophical Studies, and Erkenntnis. He was Chairman of the Department of Philosophy from 1991 to 2001. He earned his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh.

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  J. Budziszewski

  J. Budziszewski is Faculty Fellow in the Civitas Institute and Professor of Government and Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin, where he also teaches courses in the law school and the religious studies department.  He specializes in political philosophy, ethical philosophy, legal philosophy, and the interaction of religion with philosophy. Among his research interests are classical natural law, virtue ethics, conscience and moral self deception, human happiness or fulfillment, the institution of the family in relation to political and social order, religion in public life, and the problem of toleration. Professor Budziszewski is the author of nineteen books, including his recent four-part commentary on the works of Thomas Aquinas: Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), its free online partner volume, Companion to the Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Happiness and Ultimate Purpose (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Divine Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

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  Richard V. Burkhauser

  Richard V. Burkhauser is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute and Emeritus Sarah Gibson Blanding Professor of Public Policy in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. Previously, Burkhauser held tenured faculty positions in the Department of Economics at Vanderbilt University and in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Between September 2017 and May 2019, he was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President. His professional career has focused on how public policies affect the employment and well-being of vulnerable populations. In 2010 he was the President of the Association for Public Policy and Management. He has published widely in the fields of economics, public policy, demography and gerontology.  He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

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  Carlos Carvalho

  Carlos M. Carvalho is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute and the La Quinta Centennial Professor of Business in the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also Executive Director of the Salem Center for Policy, a research center that draws from multiple disciplines and empirical methods to help navigate the trade-offs of public policy decisions in pursuit of human flourishing and the preservation of a free society. Originally from Brazil, Professor Carvalho received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Duke University in 2006 and was assistant professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business before joining UT in 2010. His research, which focuses on Bayesian statistics in complex, high-dimensional problems with applications ranging from economics to genetics, has been published widely in top journals including Bayesian Analysis and Annals of Applied Statistics.

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  Sheena Chestnut Greitens

  Sheena Chestnut Greitens is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute and Associate Professor of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. She also directs UT’s Asia Policy Program, a joint initiative of the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and in 2022, is concurrently a Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).  Prof. Greitens’ teaching and research focus on American national security, East Asia, and the politics of democracy and dictatorship.  She is the author of Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which won several academic awards. Her current book projects focus on authoritarianism and diaspora politics in North Korea, and on internal security as a driver of Chinese grand strategy. She completed her Ph.D. in Government at Harvard University.

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  Kishore Gawande

  Kishore Gawande is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute, Century Club Professor, and Chair of the Business, Government and Society Department in the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Professor Gawande was previously Professor of International Economics and Development at Texas A&M University. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank and has been a Visiting Associate Professor at the Stigler Center, University of Chicago. Professor Gawande’s areas of research include international trade policy, international political economy, conflict and development. His research has been published across disciplines in Economics, Political Science and Management. He holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management and a PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles.

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  Rana Siu Inboden

  Rana Siu Inboden is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute and Senior Fellow with the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at The University of Texas at Austin. She serves as a consultant on human rights, democracy and rule of law projects in Asia for a number of nongovernmental organizations and conducts research related to international human rights, Chinese foreign policy, the effectiveness of international human rights and democracy projects and authoritarian collaboration in the United Nations. She is the author of China and the International Human Rights Regime, published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. Previously, Dr. Inboden served in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, where her primary responsibilities included managing the State Department’s Human Rights and Democracy Fund China program and promoting U.S. human rights and democracy policy in China and North Korea. She holds a DPhil from the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University.

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  William Inboden

  William Inboden is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute, William Powers, Jr., executive director of the Clements Center for National Security, and Professor of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a distinguished scholar at UT’s Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Prof. Inboden’s research and teaching interests are in the history of U.S. foreign policy. His most recent book, on the Reagan administration’s national security policies, is The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan in the White House and the World (Basic Books, 2022). Previously, he served as senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council, worked on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and was the director of the Legatum Institute, a foreign policy think tank based in London. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he completed his Ph.D. in History at Yale University.

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  Adam Klein

  Adam Klein is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute and Director of the Robert Strauss Center on International Security and Law at The University of Texas at Austin.  He also serves as Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas School of Law, where he teaches courses on national security, intelligence, and counterterrorism. Before joining the Strauss Center, Adam served as Chairman of the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the independent, bipartisan federal agency responsible for overseeing counterterrorism programs at the NSA, FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies. Previously, Adam practiced law at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, LLP and served as a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He received his BA from Northwestern University and his JD from Columbia Law School.

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  Rob Koons

  Rob Koons is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute and Professor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught for 35 years. He is the author or co-author of five books, including: Realism Regained (Oxford University Press, 2000) and The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics, with Timothy H. Pickavance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). He is the co-editor (with George Bealer) of The Waning of Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2010), (with Nicholas Teh and William Simpson) of Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (Routledge, 2018), and (with William Simpson and James Orr) of Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Nature (Routledge, 2021). He has been working recently on an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum theory, on defending and articulating Thomism in contemporary terms, and on arguments for classical theism. His forthcoming books include: Is Thomas Aquinas’s Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? (St. Augustine Press) and Classical Theism (Routledge), co-edited with Jonathan Fuqua. He completed his M.A. at Oxford University and his Ph.D. at the University of California at Los Angeles.

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  David Leal

  David L. Leal is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute, Professor of Government, and Professor (by courtesy) of Mexican American Studies and Religious Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Since 2018, he also has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Professor Leal is a scholar of Latino politics, and his work explores the political and policy implications of demographic change. He has published over fifty journal articles and edited or co-edited a dozen scholarly books and journal symposia. His recent classes include Latino Politics, Immigration Politics, Politics and Religion, and British Politics. He has been an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan, and an Associate Member of Nuffield College at Oxford University.  In 2021, he was recognized with the Distinguished Career Award from the Latina/o Caucus of the Midwest Political Science Association. He completed his Ph.D. in Government at Harvard University.

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  Dirk Mateer

  Dirk Mateer is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute and Professor of Instruction in the Department of Economics at The University of Texas at Austin. He is assisting with the development UT’s OnRamps microeconomics course for high school students and is Senior Teaching Fellow in the Economic Education and Financial Literacy program, both joint projects of the Civitas Institute and the Department of Economics. Prior to coming to UT, he received Penn State University’s highest teaching award and was voted the best overall teacher in the Smeal College of Business. While at the University of Arizona, Dirk received the University’s Koffler Teaching Prize, a quadrennial award for his contributions in economic education. He is the author of Economics in the Movies, Essentials of Economics and Principles of Economics.

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  Brian Roberts

  Brian Roberts is Faculty Fellow in the Civitas Institute, Professor of Government in the College of Liberal Arts, and Professor of Business, Government and Society (by courtesy) in the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Professor Roberts’ teaching and research are in the fields of American political institutions, interest groups, and positive political economy, with a focus on politics and financial markets, corporate political participation, and distributive politics. His scholarship has contributed to the literature in political science, economics, and finance, and has served in the past as Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and UT’s Vice President of Information Technology. He is the co-author, with Daron Shaw and Mijeong Baek, of The Appearance of Corruption: Testing the Supreme Court’s Assumptions About Campaign Finance Reform (Oxford University Press, 2021).

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  Daron Shaw

  Daron Shaw is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute and Frank Erwin Centennial Chair in the Department of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching interests include campaigns and elections, political parties, public opinion, and voting behavior. Professor Shaw is the author of The Appearance of Corruption(Oxford University Press, 2021) The Turnout Myth (Oxford University Press, 2020), Unconventional Wisdom: Facts and Myths about American Voters (Oxford University Press, 2008), The Race to 270 (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and numerous articles in leading political science including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and British Journal of Political Science. He is co-director of the Fox News Poll, co-director of the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll, director of the Texas Lyceum Poll, and associate Principal Investigator for the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California at Los Angeles.

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  Devin Stauffer

  Devin Stauffer is Faculty Fellow of the Civitas Institute and Professor of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in classical and early modern political philosophy. Prior to coming to The University of Texas in 2004, Professor Stauffer taught at Kenyon College and St. John’s College in Annapolis. During his time at Kenyon College, he received two awards for teaching excellence, and he has since received two more teaching awards at UT. Professor Stauffer’s books include Plato’s Introduction to the Question of Justice (SUNY, 2001), The Unity of Plato’s Gorgias (Cambridge, 2006), and Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light (Chicago, 2018). His articles have also appeared in some of the top journals in the field, including Review of Politics, Journal of Politics, and American Political Science Review.