Jean Yarbrough of Bowdoin College Opens Tocqueville Series Feb. 1

Bowdoin College government and social sciences professor Jean Yarbrough will open the Tocqueville Program lecture series Wednesday, Feb. 1, at 5 p.m. in Johns Hall 101 on the Furman University campus.

Her talk, “Tocqueville on the Needs of the Soul,” is free and open to the public. Her lecture is the first of the three-part Tocqueville series, “Tocqueville and the American Republic.” All lectures in the series are part of Furman’s Cultural Life Program.

Yarbrough is Professor of Government and the Gary M. Pendy, Sr. Professor of Social Sciences at Bowdoin College (Brunswick, Maine), where she teaches political philosophy and American political thought.

She has twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She serves on the editorial boards of The Review of Politics and Polity, and is former president of the New England Political Science Association (2005).

Yarbrough is the author and editor of numerous books, articles and essays on American political thought, public policy, and political philosophy including American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (Kansas, 1998), and The Essential Jefferson (Hackett, 2006).  Her most recent book, Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition (Kansas, 2013), won the Richard E. Neustadt Award, a prize given annually by the American Political Science Association for the best book on the presidency.

She holds a bachelor’s from Cedar Crest College (Allentown, Penn.), and master’s and doctorate degrees from the New School for Social Research (New York City).

Upcoming Tocqueville lectures include:

Wednesday, March 22 – Joshua Mitchell, Georgetown University, “Why the State Grows Ever-Stronger,” 5 p.m., Johns Hall 101

Wednesday, April 5 – Aurelian Craiutu, Indiana University Bloomington, “Moderation: A Virtue for Our Times,” 5 p.m., Johns Hall 101

For more information, contact Paige Blankenship in the Furman Department of Politics and International Affairs, 864-294-3547, or visit: www.furman.edu/tocquevilleprogram.