IMS Steering Committee

SEAN ERWIN

Sean Erwin is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Theology and Philosophy at Barry University. His research spans the Aristotelian tradition in Arabic and Jewish philosophy, Italian Renaissance and Early Modern thought—particularly Machiavelli and Spinoza—and twentieth-century French and Italian philosophy. He has served as Senior Editor of the Humanities and Technology Review and as Program Chair and Vice President of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy. He is also the co-founder and current co-chair of the International Machiavelli Society, and currently serves as Conference Chair of the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting.

In Machiavelli and the Problems of Military Force: A War of One’s Own (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Erwin examines how overlooked figures such as Lucretius and Aelianus Tacticus inform Machiavelli’s Art of War. He argues that Machiavelli’s militia project is not merely a tactical manual but an effort to articulate a political order in which martial discipline shapes civic institutions and the formation of citizens.

IOANNIS EVRIGENIS

Ioannis (Yannis) Evrigenis is the Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics and Director of The Open Academy at Claremont McKenna College.  His research centers on natural law and rights, psychology, rhetoric, and sovereignty in the history of political thought. He is the author of Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes’s State of Nature (2014) and of articles and chapters on a wide range of issues and thinkers in political theory, as well as co-editor of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings (2004). Evrigenis received the Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science for his book Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (2008), as well as the RSA/TCP Article Prize for Digital Renaissance Research, from the Renaissance Society of America, for his article “Digital Tools and the History of Political Thought: The Case of Jean Bodin.” With Mark Somos, he co-edited the special issue of History of European Ideas entitled “Pact with the Devil: The Ethics, Politics and Economics of Anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism.”  He is currently working on a new translation of Bodin’s Six Books on the Commonwealth.

GABRIELE PEDULLÀ

Gabriele Pedullà was born in Rome in 1972; before joining the Scuola Normale Superiore in 2025, he taught at the universities of Teramo (2002-09) and Roma Tre (2009-2025). In addition, he has been visiting professor at Stanford, UCLA, Princeton, Berkeley, and the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon; he has received fellowships from the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard centre of Italian Renaissance studies at Florence, and from the Italian Academy of Columbia University, and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

Pedullà has published five monographs: La strada più lunga. Sulle tracce di Beppe Fenoglio (Donzelli, 2001: Moretti Prize); In piena luce. I nuovi spettatori e il sistema delle arti (Bompiani, 2008; revised and enlarged English edition: In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema, Verso 2012); Machiavelli in tumulto. Conquista, cittadinanza e conflitto nei «Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio» (Bulzoni, 2011; revised and enlarged English edition: Machiavelli in Tumult: The «Discourses on Livy» and the Origins of Political Conflictualism, Cambridge University Press, 2018); On Niccolò Machiavelli: The Bonds of Politics (Columbia University Press, 2023, forthcoming in Italian for Einaudi in September 2026), and, with Nadia Urbinati Democrazia afascista (Feltrinelli, 2024).Together with Sergio Luzzatto, he conceived and directed the Atlante della letteratura italiana in three volumes (Einaudi, 2010-2012); Pedullà has also edited various Italian and non-Italian classics, among which Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (Donzelli, 2013; new enlarged edition: Donzelli, 2022; forthcoming in English for Verso in 2027).

Her articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review, History of European Ideas, History of Political Thought, Political Theory, Polity, and Review of Politics. Her current project is tentatively entitled Machiavelli on Dominions Seen and Unseen.

VICKIE SULLIVAN

Vickie Sullivan is the Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and teaches and studies political thought and philosophy. She also maintains teaching and research interests in politics and literature. She is the author of three books: Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017; Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England published by Cambridge University Press in 2004 and issued in paperback in 2006; and Machiavelli’s Three Romes: Religion, Human Liberty, and Politics Reformed published by Northern Illinois University Press in 1996 and reissued by Cornell University Press in paperback in 2020.

She has also edited two volumes: The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli: Essays on the Literary Works published by Yale University Press in 2000; and Shakespeare’s Political Pageant: Essays in Politics and Literature, with Joseph Alulis, published by Rowman & Littlefield Press in 1996.

Her articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review, History of European Ideas, History of Political Thought, Political Theory, Polity, and Review of Politics. Her current project is tentatively entitled Machiavelli on Dominions Seen and Unseen.