I teach political theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I am the Kenan Eminent Professor of Political Ethics.  I received my B.A. from the University of Michigan.  After graduating I had no plan for my life, and so I went to New Zealand and Australia for several months. I then made my way to Washington, DC, where I got hired by a small public interest group in Washington, D.C. called Citizens for Tax Justice.  I worked for CTJ for about two years, and then returned to Ann Arbor for my graduate work. In 1992, I joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska, where I eventually became the Schlesinger Professor of Social Justice. I joined Carolina in 2005.

My research focuses on the tensions that arise within contemporary liberal and democratic theory, and between theory and practice. I wrote The Boundaries of Citizenship:  Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994);  Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000);   Enduring Injustice (Cambridge University Press, 2012);  and co-edited Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Right and Diversity (Cambridge University Press, 2005).  I have a forthcoming book co-written with the political psychologist Elizabeth Theiss-Morse,  Respect and Loathing in American Democracy ((University of Chicago Press). This book is a blend of normative arguments with empirical work on peoples’s attitudes about respect and toward other citizens.  I have written many book chapters and articles, which have appeared in a number of journals, including  Ethics, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Political Studies, Journal of Politics, Polity and Perspectives on Politics. I have been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, also at Hebrew University. You can download my c.v. here, or you can look me up on academia.edu.