2024-2025 Visiting Fellow

Paul Wilford, PhD

Paul T. Wilford is a Visiting Scholar at the Elm Institute. From 2016–2024 he was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College, where he taught modern political philosophy with a focus on 19th and 20th century German philosophy. In 2019 he received the Reverend John R. Trzaska, S.J Award from Boston College in recognition of his commitment to student mentorship and in 2023 received the Jack Miller Center Award for Excellence in Civic Education. From 2019–2020 he was a fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Idealistic Studies, Political Science Reviewer, The Review of Metaphysics, American Political Thought, Perspectives on Political Science, Eidos, The Plí Journal of Philosophy, Ethics in Progress, and the Southern Journal of Philosophy. He is the co-editor of Athens, Arden, Jerusalem: Essays in Honor of Mera Flaumenhaft (Lexington, 2017) and Kant and the Possibility of Progress: From Modern Hopes to Postmodern Anxieties (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). He is currently at work on a book entitled, The Doubleness of Self-Consciousness: The Struggle for Recognition and the Longing for Transcendence in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. 

Paul holds a PhD in Philosophy from Tulane University, an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History as well as a BA in Classics from King’s College, Cambridge, and a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Annapolis.