Our People

Council of Trustees

Marion Smith
PRESIDENT AND TRUSTEE

Marion Smith is president of Common Sense Society, which he founded in 2009. CSS is an international network that promotes the principles of liberty, prosperity, and beauty. He is a director and former chairman of Washington, D.C.’s National Civic Art Society, a former visiting fellow in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at The Heritage Foundation, and the former executive director and C.E.O. of the congressionally authorized Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a bipartisan educational, research, and human rights nonprofit. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from South Carolina’s Wofford College and earned an M.A. from Central European University. His writings have been published in The Hill, Los Angeles Times, National Review, Politico, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He . . .

Professor Niall Ferguson, Ph.D.
Trustee

Prof. Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, where he was the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Diller-von Fustenburg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Ferguson is the author of twenty-two books, including Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, which gives a historical and theoretical account of disasters, and Civilization: The West and the Rest, which traces the development of Eastern and Western culture and shows where they stand today. His 2015 biography of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, won the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Prize. He is also an award-winning filmmaker . . .

Douglas Murray
TRUSTEE

Douglas Murray is a trustee of Common Sense Society, and has been a fellow since 2022. He is also an associate editor of The Spectator, author of The War on the West, and host of a new podcast series “Uncanceled History.” His previous book The Madness of Crowds was a bestseller and a book of the year for The Times and The Sunday Times, while his book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam spent almost twenty weeks on The Sunday Times bestseller list and was a number one bestseller in nonfiction.

Alexandre Pesey
TRUSTEE

Mr. Alexandre Pesey is a founder and the executive director of the Institut de Formation Politique, a conservative training Institute in Paris, France. A civic entrepreneur, Pesey is also the founder of Le Coquetier incubator and the Institute Libre de Journalisme, a journalism school dedicated to training the next generation of responsible journalists. Pesey received a law and political science degree from Paris II Panthéon-Assas University, where he taught constitutional law and international relations theories. Also a graduate from EM Lyon Business School, he is the president of Contribuables Associés (The French Taxpayers Association) which gathers a network of 350,000 members to fight for a sound economy, less public money waste, and less taxes. He is on the board of directors of The Leadership Institute and the French Riviera Institute.

Sophie Scruton
TRUSTEE

Lady Scruton is the director of Horsell’s Farm Enterprises, Ltd. which she established with her late husband, Sir Roger Scruton, to provide guidance for commercial and non-profit enterprises concerned with local farming, conservation, and the preservation of historical records. Horsell’s Farm Enterprises sponsors summer school programs and launched Athelstan Farm Foods, which uses traditional local recipes to produce cheese for wholesale partners. She is a member of the board of directors of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, which is a network of institutions and scholars committed to preserving and further developing the philosophies and cultural movements championed in Sir Roger’s work.

Thomas Peterffy
Chairman Emeritus

Thomas Peterffy is founder and chairman of Interactive Brokers and was the chairman and a trustee of Common Sense Society (2021-2023). A pioneer of digital trading in the 1980s, he was the first to build computer systems able to trade financial assets electronically, independent of direct human intervention. Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944, he escaped communism in 1965 by emigrating to the United States. He learned computer programming, and his formula for pricing contingent assets was an early version of what is now known as the Black-Scholes model. In 1977, he became a member of the American Stock Exchange. Peterffy built the first automated market-making firm for stocks, options, and futures, which later gave rise to Interactive Brokers, a global, electronic broker with more than two-thousand employees and market capitalization of $39 billion.

Fellows

Christopher Bedford
SENIOR FELLOW

Christopher Bedford is a senior fellow at Common Sense Society. He was previously a senior editor at The Federalist, editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller News Foundation, and editor-in-chief of The New Guard magazine. He is currently vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom and on the boards of The Daily Caller News Foundation and National Journalism Center. He is a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, a Pulliam Fellow at Hillsdale College, and a Madison Fellow. He has been published in The American Mind, National Review, and the New York Post, and he is a frequent guest on Fox News and Fox Business.

Benjamin Crocker
RESEARCH FELLOW IN MUSIC STUDIES

Benjamin Crocker is academic programs manager at UATX in Austin, Texas, and since 2022, has been research fellow in music studies at Common Sense Society. He is from North Queensland, Australia, and most recently taught at the King’s School in Sydney. Ben has lectured and guest conducted at the University of Sydney and recorded for nationwide radio broadcast at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2021, he was appointed as an inaugural Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation scholar to Washington, D.C. His columns have been published by The Spectator, The Federalist, and Australia’s Quadrant magazine.

Michael Curtis
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE

Michael Curtis is the artist-in-residence at Common Sense Society. He is a sculptor, painter, historian, architectural designer and poet. He has taught and lectured at universities, colleges, and museums, including the Institute for Classical Architecture and Art, the College for Creative Studies, and the National Gallery of Art. His pictures and statues are housed in over three hundred private and public collections, including the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Supreme Court. His plays, essays, verse and translations have been published in over thirty journals. His most recent nonfiction books include, Occasional Poetry: How to Write Poems for Any Occasion, and The Classical Architecture and Monuments of Washington, D.C.: A History and Guide.

Orsolya Domaniczky
RESEARCH FELLOW

Orsolya Domaniczky is a research fellow at Common Sense Society and former director of Common Sense Society–Hungary. She is a political scientist with expertise in the fields of biodiversity and sustainability and is co-owner of a boutique consulting firm. She previously worked as a policy officer for CEEweb for Biodiversity, a network of non-government organizations that promote biodiversity in Central and Eastern Europe. As a Pannonius Fellow with Common Sense Society, Domaniczky studied under Sir Roger Scruton and published on ecology, environmental stewardship, and political philosophy. She received an M.S. in environmental science and policy from Central European University and a B.A. in political science and international relations from Corvinus University of Budapest in addition to studying philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University.

Catesby Leigh
SENIOR FELLOW

Mr. Catesby Leigh is a senior fellow at Common Sense Society and a past co-founder and research fellow of the National Civic Art Society. After graduating from Princeton, he spent most of the 1980s as a foreign correspondent for the Atlanta-based Cox Newspapers in South America. He grew increasingly interested in traditional architectural environments and was struck by their modernist counterparts’ failure to achieve comparable levels of physical or visual amenity. Leigh’s first architecture articles appeared in 1991, and since then he has contributed art and architecture criticism to a wide range of publications including City Journal, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, The American Conservative, and the Claremont Review of Books.

Faculty

Malcolm Archer

Malcolm Archer has been an organist and director of music at three English cathedrals: Bristol, Wells, and St. Paul’s. He is also a conductor, composer, organist, pianist, and harpsichordist who has given solo concerts across the world, including tours in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Europe. He has recorded with labels including Warner Classics, Hyperion, Lammas, and . . .

Katharine Birbalsingh CBE

Ms. Katharine Birbalsingh CBE is the founder and headmistress of Michaela Community School, a charter school established in Wembley Park, London. She has been identified as among the twenty most influential figures in British education and was awarded the Contrarian Prize. She is the author of several books; her most recent, The Power of Culture, was published in 2020. Her work and pedagogy . . .

Det Bowers

Mr. Det Bowers is a principal at Wilson Kibler, South Carolina’s most accomplished independent full-service commercial real estate firm. Prior to joining Wilson Kibler, Mr. Bowers served as a licensed attorney practicing in federal, state, and municipal courts. Other business involvements have included real estate development, retail development and operations, agribusiness, forestry . . .

Guy Burnett, Ph.D.

Dr. Guy Burnett is the director of education and research at the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation and a Common Sense Society Carolina Fellowship alumnus. He is author of The Safeguard of Liberty and Property: The Supreme Court, Kelo v. New London, and the Takings Clause. His articles have appeared in Society, Political Behavior, the Claremont Review of Books, and . . .

Elbridge Colby

Elbridge Colby is co-founder and principal of The Marathon Initiative and author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development from 2017-2018, where he directed the development and rollout of the Department’s preeminent strategic planning guidance. His work has . . .

Seth Cropsey

Seth Cropsey began his career as assistant to the secretary of defense and was later commissioned as a naval officer. He served as deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and acting assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict in the George H. W. Bush administration. Confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he became director of the . . .

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple (the pen name of Dr. Anthony Daniels) is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is a retired physician who, most recently, practiced in a British inner-city hospital and prison. Denis Dutton, editor of Arts & Letters Daily, called Dalrymple the “Orwell of our time.”

Robin Dunbar, Ph.D.

Dr. Robin Dunbar is head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. An anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, specialist in primate behavior, he is best known for formulating Dunbar’s number, a measurement of the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships.”

Tim Eriksen, Ph.D.

Dr. Tim Eriksen is an acclaimed musician who has transformed the American tradition with his interpretations of old ballads, love songs, shape-note gospel, and dance tunes from New England and Southern Appalachia. He combines vocals with inventive accompaniment on banjo, fiddle, guitar, and bajo sexto. Dr. Eriksen’s compositions have been featured in films and documentaries. He has . . .

Michael Federici, Ph.D.

Dr. Michael Federici is professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University and chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations. He served on the faculty at Mercyhurst University from August 1993-May 2017. While at Mercyhurst, he was faculty senate president and on the university’s Board of Trustees from 2011-2013 and 2007-2009. He received . . .

Botond Feledy

Botond Feledy is a lawyer, foreign policy expert, and commentator, currently researching cyber security and Russian influence in Central Europe. Recently he was elected as member of the #NewEurope100, a joint initiative of Google, Financial Times, Visegrad Fund and the Polish Res Publica Foundation to choose yearly Central Europe’s hundred most transformative people. Mr. Feledy . . .

Juliana Geran Pilon, Ph.D.

Dr. Juliana Geran Pilon is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. The author of eight books, including The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom and Why America is Such a Hard Sell: Beyond Pride and Prejudice, she has published over two hundred articles and reviews and makes frequent appearances on radio and television. Over . . .

Prof. Ferenc Hörcher

Prof. Ferenc Hörcher is head of the Research Institute of Politics and Government of the University of Public Service, Hungary, and a senior research fellow of the Institute of Philosophy of the József Eötvös Research Network, Hungary. He is a political philosopher and a historian of political thought. His last book publications include: A Political Philosophy of Conservatism and . . .

Samuel Hughes, Ph.D.

Dr. Samuel Hughes is a research fellow at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow at Policy Exchange. He has spent time as a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Notre Dame. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and has particular interests in architecture and urbanism in terms of philosophy, history, and public policy.

Robert Jeffrey, Ph.D.

Dr. Robert Jeffrey is professor of government at Wofford College. He received his Ph.D. in political philosophy and literature from the University of Dallas. He previously served as a political appointee in the Reagan Administration. He currently teaches classical and modern political philosophy, and the statesmanship of Churchill, Lincoln, Homer, and Shakespeare. He most recently taught . . .

Seth D. Kaplan, Ph.D.

Dr. Seth D. Kaplan is a professorial lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, senior adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions, and consultant to the World Bank, USAID, the U.S. Department of State, and OECD. He is the author of the Department of State’s Political Transitions Analysis Framework and co-author . . .

Wilfred M. McClay, Ph.D.

Dr. Wilfred M. McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College. He served for eleven years on the National Council on the Humanities and is currently a member of the U.S. Commission on the Semiquincentennial, which has been charged with planning the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026. His most . . .

Prof. Walter Russell Mead

Prof. Walter Russell Mead was the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Stiftung. He is currently a distinguished fellow in American strategy and statesmanship at the Hudson Institute. Professor Mead is the author of God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World; Power, Terror, Peace . . .

Joshua Mitchell, Ph.D.

Dr. Joshua Mitchell a professor of political theory at Georgetown University. From 2002 to 2005, he was the chair of Georgetown’s government department and he was the associate dean of faculty affairs at the School of Foreign Service in Qatar from 2005 to 2006. Since 2005, he has taught courses there periodically for several years. During the 2008-10 academic years, Dr. Mitchell took leave from Georgetown, and became the acting chancellor of The American University of Iraq—Sulaimani. His areas of interest range from the ancient world to contemporary America and Europe. His thinking has been deeply informed by the nineteenth-century writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, who anticipated the problem of loneliness and isolation in the modern world, and who thought that to combat it, families . . .

Jeffry Morrison, Ph.D.

Dr. Jeffry Morrison is professor of American studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, and director of academics at the federal government’s James Madison Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. He graduated with distinction from Boston College and from Georgetown University, where he earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in government. Dr. Morrison has also held faculty positions at Princeton . . .

James Orr, Ph.D.

Dr. James Orr is associate professor of philosophy of religion in the faculty of divinity at the University of Cambridge, a position he took up after four years as McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Christ Church, Oxford. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in philosophy of religion from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in classics from Balliol College, Oxford. Before entering academia, . . .

John O’Sullivan

Mr. John O’Sullivan is a journalist, author, lecturer and broadcaster. He is president of the Danube Institute in Budapest; assistant editor of the Hungarian Review; international editor of Sydney’s Quadrant Magazine; co-founder of Twenty-first Century Initiatives, a Washington, D.C. think tank; a fellow of the National Review Institute; and the founder and co-chairman of the New Atlantic Initiative. He served as a special adviser to . . .

Maria Pia Paganelli, Ph.D.

Dr. Maria Pia Paganelli is a professor of economics at Trinity University. She is the author of The Routledge Guidebook to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and co-edited the Oxford Handbook on Adam Smith and Adam Smith and Rousseau. She formerly served as vice president of the History of Economics Society and the book review editor for the Journal of the History of Economic Thought. She is the current president . . .

Pythagoras Petratos, Ph.D.

Dr. Pythagoras Petratos is a lecturer at the SAID Business School at the University of Oxford. He is a visiting fellow at Buckingham University and a visiting professor at the University of Thessaly. One of his main research interests lies in defense policy and economics and particularly the economics and financing of information security.

Roger Pilon, Ph.D.

Dr. Roger Pilon is a senior fellow in the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, which he founded in 1989 and directed until 2019; the inaugural holder emeritus of Cato’s B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies, Cato’s first endowed chair, established in 1998; the publisher emeritus of the Cato Supreme Court Review, which he founded in 2001; and Cato’s vice president for legal affairs, which he was named . . .

Tyson Reeder, Ph.D.

Dr. Tyson Reeder is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, where he is an editor with the Papers of James Madison, specializing in Madison’s tenure as secretary of state. He is the author of Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution and the editor of The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations. He is currently writing a book on foreign meddling and foreign collusion . . .

Aaron Rhodes, Ph.D.

Dr. Aaron Rhodes is president of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe. He was executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights from 1993-2007. He is a writer, human rights activist, and advocate for the reform of international human rights law and institutions. He is a co-founder of the Freedom Rights Project, a human rights research initiative and think-tank. In 2008, he established the . . .

Jay Richards, Ph.D.

Dr. Jay Richards is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and the executive editor of The Stream. Richards is author or editor of more than a dozen books and is also executive producer of several documentaries. His articles and essays have been published in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Federalist, among other outlets.

Adm. Michael Rogers

Adm. Michael Rogers served as commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, director of the National Security Agency, and chief of Central Security Service. Since becoming a flag officer in 2007, Rogers has also served as the intelligence director for both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Pacific Command, and most recently as commander of the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command/U.S. 10th Fleet. Rogers is a graduate of Auburn University . . .

Jeffrey Rogg, Ph.D.

Dr. Jeffrey Rogg is an assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel. His research areas include U.S. intelligence history, civil-intelligence relations, comparative intelligence, and national security policy. The Intelligence Studies Project at The University of Texas at Austin recognized Dr. Rogg’s innovative study of American civil-intelligence relations with the Bobby R. Inman Award . . .

David C. Rose, Ph.D.

Dr. David C. Rose a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a member of the Missouri Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. He is widely published on these and other topics, including business ethics, E.S.G. investment and management, global warming, and monetary policy. In 2008, Dr. Rose received the St. Louis Business Journal’s Economic Educator of the year award. His book . . .

Garrett Ward Sheldon, Ph.D.

Dr. Garrett Ward Sheldon is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and an ordained Christian minister. He has taught political theory, American political thought, law, and religion. He has published ten books, including The History of Political Theory: Ancient Greece to Modern America, Religion and Politics: Major Thinkers on the Relation of Church and State, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, and . . .

Justin Shubow

Justin Shubow is president of the National Civic Art Society and former chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. He is the author of a variety of architectural commentaries, has taught courses on the topics of public art and architecture, and has overseen restoration projects. He is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation and the Board of Academic Advisors of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.

James R. Sofka, Ph.D.

Dr. James R. Sofka specializes in international relations and political leadership in the era of the American Founding. He has designed and delivered innovative academic, executive education, and general audience courses in these fields in both traditional and distance-learning formats and teaches regularly for the Brookings Institution, the Federal Executive Institute, and the University of Virginia’s Osher Lifelong Learning . . .

László Stachó, Ph.D.

Dr. László Stachó teaches at the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest. Over the past decade, he has been involved in a countrywide planning of music education curricula across Hungary. As a pianist and chamber musician, he has performed in several European countries, Israel, and the U.S. He conducts workshops of his attention training and chamber music coaching sessions at international masterclasses in fifteen . . .

Joseph Stoltz, Ph.D.

Dr. Joseph Stoltz is director of the George Washington Leadership Institute at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon. He previously was a member of the United States Military Academy Department of History. He studies the Continental Army and is currently writing a history of its Main Army. He is the author of A Bloodless Victory: The Battle of New Orleans in History and . . .

Liza Tobin

Liza Tobin is the senior director of research and analysis for economy at the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP). Before joining SCSP, she served on the National Security Council staff as China director, where she led the development of multiple U.S. strategies and policies related to China, including on trade and economics, climate and the environment, military issues, and China’s influence beyond the Indo-Pacific. Before . . .

Christopher Tollefsen, Ph.D.

Dr. Christopher Tollefsen is a distinguished professor and chair of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. He is a leading scholar of natural law and natural rights, who has expertise on the classical, medieval, and modern traditions of thought. He has made important contributions to philosophical scholarship in the areas of bioethics, the ethics of inquiry, and the role of intention in shaping the meaning of human action. He is . . .

Michael Ward, Ph.D.

Dr. Michael Ward is a member of the faculty of theology and religion at the University of Oxford and professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University. He is the author of the award-winning book, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, and presenter of the BBC television documentary, The Narnia Code. His latest book is After Humanity . . .

Jerry Weinberger, Ph.D.

Dr. Jerry Weinberger is a professor emeritus of political science and university distinguished professor at Michigan State University. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought. From 1997-2001 he was chair of the Department of Political Science. He received his B.A. from The University of California at Berkeley . . .

Jean Yarbrough, Ph.D.

Dr. Jean Yarbrough is a professor of government and the Gary M. Pendy, Sr. Professor of Social Sciences at Bowdoin College. She has twice received research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (N.E.H.). She is the author of American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People and Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition, and editor of The Essential Jefferson. Dr. Yarbrough . . .

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