The combined faculty and staff at the Salvatori Center: Lead mentoring relationships between students and scholars in an intimate academic setting. Organize intellectual events, such as Friday lunch seminars, Saturday salons, research presentations, and visiting guests — all designed to foster inquiry on freedom, constitutionalism, and civic life. Help integrate research and teaching, enabling students to engage directly with faculty-led projects and contribute to scholarly work.
Salvatori Center Staff
George Thomas Ph.D.
Director of the Salvatori Center
Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions
Professor Thomas has authored books such as The (Un)Written Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2021), The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Madisonian Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), and has co-authored American Constitutional Law: Essays, Cases, and Comparative Notes (West Academic, 2018), as well as numerous scholarly articles on American Constitutionalism.
Valerie Cubias
Program Coordinator of the Salvatori Center
Valerie Cubias serves as Program Coordinator for the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College, where she tracks and coordinates campus events, leads communications and media, and helps advance student-led projects and collaborative initiatives across departments, institutes, and student organizations.
With a B.A. in Relational and Organizational Communication and a minor in Spanish, Valerie draws on her academic background and experience in higher education administration to
provide strategic support, organize programming, and foster connections across the campus community. She is passionate about helping students develop their ideas, engage effectively, and contribute to a vibrant, inclusive college environment.
Valerie approaches her work with warmth and intention, guided by a commitment to elevating diverse voices and strengthening collaboration across the campus.
Affiliated Faculty
Beyond the director and core staff, the Salvatori Center’s work is enriched by faculty affiliates — professors across CMC (and sometimes from partnering institutions) whose teaching and research align with the Center’s mission to explore political philosophy, constitutionalism, freedom, and democratic thought. These scholars often participate in seminars, advise students, and contribute to the intellectual culture of the Center.
Mark Blitz
Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy
Former Director of the Salvatori Center, he served during the Reagan administration as Associate Director of the United States Information Agency and as a senior professional member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He has also been Vice President of the Hudson Institute and has taught Political Theory at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on several boards, including the Society of Scholars at Princeton University, the Children’s Education Center of Claremont, and the Delba Winthrop Prize committee.
Nicholas Buccola
Professor of Government
Professor Buccola's teaching and research are in the area of American political thought. He is the author of The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America and The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty. He is the editor of The Essential Douglass: Writings and Speeches and Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy. His scholarly essays have appeared in a wide range of academic journals, including The Review of Politics and American Political Thought. His public intellectual work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, and Dissent. He is currently completing a monograph on the idea of freedom in the civil rights and conservative movements, and co-editing The Princeton History of American Political Thought.
Zachary Courser
Associate Professor of the Practice
Zachary Courser is Director of CMC's Policy Lab, a Fellow with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC, and a Professor of Government. His research agenda focuses on public policy, political parties, democracy, Congress, and populism. He is an expert on congressionally directed spending, having co-authored two reports with leading DC think tanks on the subject, and is currently working on a book manuscript on the subject. Prof. Courser has led several research partnerships for CMC’s Policy Lab with a variety of think tanks, including the Bipartisan Policy Center, RAND Corporation, American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution. He has also organized international conferences on topics such as populism and contemporary challenges to western liberalism from Russia.
Michael Fortner
Associate Professor of Government
Professor Fortner earned his B.A. from Emory Univeristy and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. His areas of expertise include American culture and politics, crime, criminal justice history, inequality, public policy, public administration, and race and ethnicity.
Seth Lobis
Associate Professor of Literature
Professor Lobis earned his B.A. and his Ph.D. from Yale. He published “The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in 17th Century England” in 2015. His areas of expertise include Milton, Renaissance literature, and Shakespeare.
Susan J. McWilliams
Chair of Politics, Pomona College
As Professor of Politics at Pomona College, McWilliams has won the Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching three times and is an elected member of the Executive Council of the American Political Science Association. She has received the Graves Award in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Quarry Farm Fellowship from the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies, and other awards.
James H. Nichols
Jules L. Whitehill Professor of Humanism & Ethics
Professor Nichols is also Avery Fellow at Claremont Graduate University. Educated at Yale and Cornell, he has taught at McMaster University, the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, and Yale University, and spent a year working at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington as Associate Director of the Division of General Programs.
Emily Pears
Associate Professor of Government
Professor Pears earned her B.A. in government from Claremont McKenna College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the development of patriotic attachments and constitutional union in the American Founding and early 19th century, and she is broadly interested in questions of nationalism and political culture in American political thought.
John Pitney
Roy P. Crocker Professor of Politics
Professor Pitney earned his B.A. from Union College and his M.A., M.Phil, and Ph.D. from Yale. His areas of expertise include American politics, California politics, Congress, electoral politics, the Internet & politics, media politics, national elections, political advertising, political parties, the presidency, and public policy.
Jon Shields
Chair of Government
Professor Shields teaches courses on contentious issues such as policing, free speech, and American culture wars. Previously, he taught at the University of Colorado and Cornell University. He is also a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance. He's currently co-authoring a book with Stephanie Muravchik on Liz Cheney’s Wyoming.