Fellows

The Elm Institute’s Fellows contribute to and collaborate with the intellectual life of the Institute.

Gregory M. Collins

Yale University

Gregory M. Collins is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. Greg’s scholarly and teaching interests include the history of political thought, the philosophical and ethical implications of political economy, American political development, constitutional theory and practice, and the political theory of abolition. Greg won the 2020 Novak Award, awarded annually by the Acton Institute to one young scholar who conducts research on the intersection of liberty and virtue. He is the author of Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and has published articles in Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, American Political Thought, Slavery & Abolition, and in Perspectives on Political Science. His current book project is a study of the idea of civil society in African-American political, social, and economic thought. He received his BA from University of Massachusetts - Amherst and his PhD from Catholic University of America.

Mordechai Levy-Eichel

Yale University

Mordechai is a lecturer in the Political Science Department and Humanities Program at Yale, where he hides his formal academic identity as a historian, and his escapades as a critic, and general scholarly skeptic of scholarship. He primarily works on the history and philosophy of learning and education, having had a fairly idiosyncratic education himself, ranging from various yeshivot to homeschooling to the University of Chicago. Trained as an early modern Atlantic and European historian who somehow often spends his time exploring the bowels of nineteenth-century America, he is writing an episodic history on the rise of the modern university and the research ideal. He has published both in academic journals and in popular magazines, ranging from Intellectual History Review to Tablet to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

His dissertation on the spread of early modern mathematical learning was awarded the Elizabethan Prize for “outstanding work on literature, arts, or culture of the Renaissance,” and in 2022 he was the inaugural winner of the Lux et Veritas faculty teaching award which “recognizes a Yale faculty member who actively fosters intellectual diversity for students in and out of the classroom.” When the spirit moves him, he posts at antieducation.substack.com.

Danilo Petranovich

Abigail Adams Institute

Danilo Petranovich (G’07) is the Director of Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Petranovich has taught political science at Duke and Yale Universities, where he offered courses on liberalism and conservatism in the United States, American political thought, the American presidency, ethical leadership, nationalism and patriotism, and the history of Western political philosophy, as well as two seminars on William F. Buckley’s role in American politics (Dr. Petranovich served for seven months as Bill Buckley’s amanuensis). Dr. Petranovich is currently writing a book (under contract with Yale University Press) about the three-decade duel between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, which resulted, he argues, in a transformation of American nationhood. He received his BA from Harvard and his PhD in Political Science from Yale.