Morel Named Research Fellow in the James Madison Program, Princeton University
Lucas Morel, associate professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, has been named a Research Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University for the 2008-09 academic year.
Morel, who teaches American Government, Political Philosophy and Black American Politics, among other topics at W&L, will spend the academic year in residence at Princeton researching his new book, “Abraham Lincoln and the Fragile American Republic.”
The book will be Morel’s third. He is also the author of “Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man” (UP of Kentucky, 2004) and “Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government” (Lexington Books, 2000).
“Spending my sabbatical year at the James Madison Program will permit me to write, write, write about my favorite political figure and arguably the greatest statesman the world has ever witnessed,” said Morel. “As a Visiting Research Fellow in a program devoted to the study of American ideals and institutions, I can work out my thesis about the most controversial aspects of Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and practice among scholars with a similar devotion to the principles of the American regime.
“I especially look forward to seeing how recent scholarship about Lincoln, the Civil War, and antebellum history confirms, challenges, and otherwise informs my argument about the meaning of the American Union for Lincoln and his approach to the slavery controversy and black American citizenship,” Morel continued. “As the nation and the world anticipates the bicentennial celebration of Lincoln’s birth, I can’t think of a better way to spend the 2008-09 academic year.”
Morel received his B.A. from Claremont McKenna College and an M.A. and Ph. D. from the Claremont Graduate School. The author of numerous scholarly articles and essays, he has taught politics and been the pre-law advisor at Washington and Lee since 1999.
