Matthew Reising

Assistant Professor

CONTACT

matthew.reising@austin.utexas.edu

Matthew K. Reising is an assistant professor in the School of Civic Leadership. His research focuses on freedom and constitutionalism in the history of political thought, from the classical and medieval world to the American colonies. His first book, Herodotus and the Birth of Freedom, is forthcoming through Edinburgh University Press. His articles have won various awards and appeared in multiple academic journals, including The Thomist, The Journal of Politics, Polity, American Political Thought, and Polis. He was previously a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the James Madison Program at Princeton University and the assistant director of the Zavala Program for Constitutional Studies at Baylor University, where he also received his Ph.D. in political science.

EDUCATION
A.S. in General Studies from Vincennes University
BA in History, Political Science, and Philosophy from Ashland University
MA in Political Science from Baylor University
Ph.D. in Political Science from Baylor University

Political Philosophy

MKR_Public_CV (2)

Herodotus and the Birth of Freedom: Liberty in Ancient Greece and Persia. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, Forthcoming.

“A Testament to Hope: The Natural Law Politics of Phillis Wheatley Peters’ Poetry,” Journal of Politics, forthcoming.

“The Contested Reception of Herodotus’s History in American Antebellum Slavery Debates,” Polity, forthcoming.

2024

“What Happened to Joy? A Metastructural Examination of Joy in the Summa Theologiae,” The Thomist 88, no. 4: 627-652.

“Aquinas on the Socratic Paradox and the Problem of Virtue,” History of Political Thought 45, no. 3: 425-447.

“The King’s House or the Tyrant’s Palace? Rethinking Persia in Herodotus’s History,” Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 41, no. 2: 203-226.

“Rethinking Intellectual Ecumenicism in Interfaith Debates on God’s Existence: From Avicenna’s Salvation and Maimonides’ Guide to Aquinas’s De Ente,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 59, no. 2: 242-262.

“The Dialectical Foundations of Natural Law in Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia,” Perspectives on Political Science 53, no. 3: 154-163.

2022

“James Otis and the Glorious Revolution in America,” American Political Thought 11, no. 2 (2022): 161-184; awarded “The Best Article in American Political Thought for 2023” by the American Political Science Association.