Biography

I was born in Syracuse, NY in 1967. I attended Syracuse public schools, except for scattered years when my family lived in England. My father is a history professor, my mother teaches elementary school, and my sister is now an English professor.

After a semester in Florence, Italy, I attended Yale College, where I was the first directly elected president of the Yale College Council, a press secretary for a New Haven Alderwoman, and a philosophy major. I graduated from Yale in 1989.

From 1989 until 1991, I attended Balliol College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. There I wrote a dissertation, based on my Yale senior essay, that became my Nietzsche book. In the summer between my two years of graduate school, I was a philosophy teaching assistant at SUNY/Purchase. In 1992, I returned briefly to Oxford to defend my dissertation and was awarded a doctorate in philosophy.

Starting in the fall of 1991, I had moved to Washington, DC, to work as a research associate for Common Cause, helping to lobby for campaign finance reform and government ethics. While at Common Cause, I taught classes in political philosophy and in Wittgenstein at Georgetown University's School of Summer and Continuing Education.

In 1993, I joined the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy as a research scholar. I have also been an Associate of the Kettering Foundation and the Deputy Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. In 2001, I became Deputy Director of CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. In 2006, I became CIRCLE's Director. Since 2002, I have played a part in creating two other organizations, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools (whose Steering Committee I chair) and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. My research, advocacy, and teaching work is described on other pages (click here for summary).

In 1996, I married Laura Broach. We live in Washington, DC, with two daughters. My hobbies include playing the clavichord, doing the daily cooking, and writing fiction.