Research Workshops

About Our Research Workshops

Research Workshops are weekend-long, round-table discussions, bringing together 12-15 scholars in order to provide valuable feedback from a variety of perspectives on a work, or multiple works, in progress. Workshops offer academics the opportunity to advance inquiry on important topics within the classical liberal tradition, strengthen specific research contributions, and form interdisciplinary and inter-generational networks of scholars with whom they can collaborate in the future.

Manuscript Workshops provide constructive feedback on a single book manuscript and offer commenters the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to a fellow scholar’s work. IHS also sponsors Papers Workshops which bring together authors contributing to a collected volume or special journal issue to workshop their individual contributions as well as identify themes and improve the work as a whole. Learn more about Papers Workshops here.

Program Format

Manuscript Workshops vary in size and typically include 12-15 scholars for larger workshops and 4-6 for smaller ones. The workshop takes place over 4-6 sessions (They are 75 minutes for online programs, and 90 minutes for in-person programs). Each session covers about 1-3 chapters. At the start of each session, the author will give a brief overview of the chapters to provide context about their goals and areas they’d like to highlight for feedback, and then the floor will be opened for moderated, roundtable discussion using a queue system to be explained at the start of the program.

Participants do not need to prepare a formal presentation but are expected to read the manuscript in its entirety and prepare comments on each section to be shared during the moderated discussion.

Participant honorarium is contingent upon full participation in the workshop. Participants who fail to attend the entire program risk forfeiture of their honorarium unless a prior arrangement has been made. Participants who are unable to attend a workshop in its entirety should email us at Workshops@TheIHS.org to see if an exception can be made.

Participants will receive a PDF copy of the manuscript about two months before the workshop and a physical copy about a month and a half before the workshop.  When commenting on the manuscript, participants are encouraged to provide feedback that helps the author strengthen their arguments, clarifies important points, offers new resources for the author to take into consideration, presents challenges to help the author think about the topic in a new way, and even offers suggestions on publishing if it has not yet been determined.

Interested In Having Your Work Reviewed?

IHS supports authors throughout their careers with these workshops, including assistance for those who wish to convert a recently defended dissertation into a monograph or articles.

If you have any questions, please contact us at Workshops@TheIHS.org.

As part of its Discourse Initiative, IHS is particularly interested in research and programs in the following general categories: Liberalism and Its Critics, Key Challenges within a Free Society, Cultural Challenges within Liberal Society, Contentious Topics within the Liberal Tradition, and Liberalism in Times of Crisis. Learn more about the Discourse Initiative here.

IHS welcomes applications and proposals on these or other related topics from scholars in all disciplines.

Upcoming Manuscript Workshops

Upcoming Manuscript Workshops are listed below. Scholars interested in contributing to a collected volume or special journal issue are encouraged to learn more about Papers Workshops with IHS.

Making a Constitution: Montesquieu, the American Founding, and the Challenge of Statesmanship

Author: Zachary German
Prof. German addresses questions of statesmanship and constitutional design through a comparison of the political thought of Montesquieu, the Federalists, and the Anti-Federalists. This work focuses on the underexplored comparison of how these thinkers view the relationship between institutional design, civic character, social, cultural, and other non-political factors.

From Property, Liberty: Distributism and Price Theory in Conversation

Author: Alex Salter
Salter argues that modern social science has missed the valuable distributist claim from writers like Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton that societies cannot remain politically free unless they are economically secure and independent. In this project, he conducts a ‘rational reconstruction’ of distributism.

A City Cannot Be a Work of Art: Learning Economics and Social Theory from Jane Jacobs

Author: Sandford Ikeda
“A City Cannot be a Work of Art” examines the influence of Jane Jacobs on economics and social theory. In this book, Prof. Ikeda, using the work of Jacobs as the focal point, illuminates why urbanists and economists have important things to learn from each other.

Has the Populist Right Replaced the Left? The Demise of the Center-Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Eastern Europe

Author: Maria Snegovaya
Dr. Snegovaya lays out the extensive parallels between the populist right backlashes in both Western and Eastern Europe, demonstrating that the rise of East European right-wing populism was the result of the left parties’ implementation of austerity policies.

The Community of Public Reason

Author: Chad Van Schoelandt
“The Community of Public Reason” examines the tensions between liberalism & community, ultimately arguing that liberal institutions provide a framework in which many diverse communities flourish, that many social ideals of community are rightly rejected for society as a whole since they are incompatible with liberalism’s characteristic diversity, and that a polymorphic or multiply realizable ideal of open community is more appropriate for liberal society.

Why It’s OK to Mind Your Own Business

Authors: Brandon Warmke & Justin Tosi
“Why It’s OK to Mind Your Own Business” offers a defense of toleration and minding your own business. Through application of traditional moral philosophy and empirical moral psychology the authors demonstrate the shortfalls of ambitious moral projects. The work puts forward a positive case toward toleration of putative imperfections in others and a Millian argument that norms of modesty about moral intervention promote a social environment friendly to diverse individual ideals.

Natural Property Rights

Author: Dr. Eric Claeys
“Natural Property Rights” introduces a theory of natural rights that relies on an application of the principles of natural law. The book focuses primarily on explaining the basic architecture of a system of property, accomplishing three goals: explaining how natural rights are justified and structured, showing how natural rights apply in law and in practice, and making natural rights seem relevant to contemporary life and thought

Understanding Justice

Author: Dr. Greg Robson
In this book, Prof. Robson argues for a hybrid, Millian-Nozickean view of political liberalism and against Rawlsian views of political liberalism and socialist alternatives. His account focuses specifically on the benefits of political experimentation within a stable constitutional tradition and the value of maintaining robust freedoms of speech and political association. He argues that members of a society with such features are well equipped to learn about the demands of justice and will treat each other more justly both interpersonally and in terms of institutional design.

Neil Chilson Manuscript Workshop

Author: Neil Chilson
"Out of Control: Enabling Emergent Order in Public Policy and Private Life" examines how emergent order – order without any one in control – is ubiquitous in our world, and distills six principles of emergent order that can improve policy debates and personal decisions. As events around us seem ever more chaotic, many in modern society grasp for control to solve the problems we face. But pursuing control is frequently counterproductive. We should relinquish unwise attempts to control the world, and instead should seek to understand and promote emergent order.

Research Application Form