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Doctoral Student
Political Theory

• Fields of Study

  • Political Theory, Public Law, Religion and Politics

• About

  Brendan is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, with a primary focus in political theory, public law, and women’s studies. He is currently a graduate fellow at the Institute for Humanities at the University of Michigan. His major research interests include democratic theory, constitutional law and politics, American political thought and practice, political rhetoric, and the relationship between religion and politics. Uniting all these interests is a concern with how diverse cultural and institutional resources are mobilized by actors in order to make political claims and challenge (or sustain) existing arrangements of power. In his dissertation, he reconfigures the theoretical puzzle of religion’s place in democratic politics by turning to religion’s poetic capacities. Religion, by this framing, involves not just a set of knowledge or justificatory doctrines but also rhetorical and performative resources that enable active contestation and constitute a historically significant genre of claims making in American politics. This account is developed through close analyses of a series of historical case studies.

• Education

  • Moravian College, Bachelor of Arts, English and Political Science (2006)

• Awards

  • Sweetland/Rackham Dissertation Institute Award, Sweetland Center for Writing, University of Michigan (2012)
  • The Ronald J. Stupek Award, Moravian College (2006)
  • Lebensfeld Prize, Moravian College (2004-2006)

• Grants

  • Institute for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowship, University of Michigan (2012)
  • Summer Collaboration Grant, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan (2011)
  • Departmental fellowship, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan (2011)
  • Founders Scholarship, Moravian College (2003)

• Presentations

  • “‘A sublime and serious Religious Democracy’: William Lloyd Garrison and the Civil Religious Poetics of Antebellum Abolitionism.” Midwest Political Science Association Conference. Chicago, Illinois. April 2012
  • “‘Their Blood Cries Out’: Religious Zealotry and the Prophetic Modes of Democratic Dissent in America.” Twenty-seventh Annual Graduate Research Symposium, Kent State University. April 2012
  • “Towards a Post-Secular Democracy: Re-imagining the Democratic Potential of the Theologico-Political.” Political Theory Workshop, University of Michigan. November 2010

• Dissertation Title

  • Divine Entanglements: Religious Claims-making and American Democracy

• Dissertation Chair

  • Elizabeth Wingrove

• Dissertation Committee

  • Pamela Brandwein, Mika LaVaque-Manty, Christopher Skeaff, Tomoko Masuzawa (History)