Bradley J. Birzer

I hold the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and am Professor of History at Hillsdale College, Michigan. I proudly serve on the boards of the Free Enterprise Institute and The Center for Cultural Renewal. I am also happily a “Fellow” and/or “Scholar” with the The American Conservative, Foundation for Economic Education, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The McConnell Center for Public Policy, the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, and the Center for Economic Personalism (Brazil). In 2010, I co-founded The Imaginative Conservative website with Winston Elliott, and, I also write for Ignatius Insight, Catholic World Report, Townhall, and The American Conservative. In 1990, I earned my B.A. from the University of Notre Dame, and, in 1998, I earned my PhD from Indiana University. I have had the great privilege to study with such excellent scholars as R. David Edmund, Bernard Sheehan, Russ Hanson, Anne Butler, Walter Nugent, Greg Dowd, and Marvin O’Connell. I am author of several books and scholarly articles. Most importantly, though, my lovely wife (Dedra) and I have seven children and two cats. We split our time between Hillsdale, Michigan, and FairPlay, Colorado. For the 2014-2015 school year, I has the wonderful honor of being the “Scholar in Residence” and “Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy,” University of Colorado-Boulder. I have lots of loves: human liberty and dignity; baking; cooking; playing Legos with my kids; hiking and backpacking; good writing; Christian Humanism; Batman and DC Comics; Frank Miller and Dark Horse Comics; Apple products; and progressive rock and progressive jazz. I've also been an Amazon.com customer since the fall of 1997.