The nation’s best teachers come to OU every spring for a day of teaching and discussion about some aspect of the Constitution. This has been a signature event for the campus and the community since 2012, and thousands of students and citizens have attended the lectures. Recent topics include “Native Nations and the Constitution” and “The Supreme Court and the Constitution.” Teach-In is supported by the generosity of donors, especially the Horizon Foundation.
2025 Teach-In: Presidential Power and the Constitution is available for viewing. Live stream of the 2026 event will be available when event is in progress.
Location: The University of Oklahoma Memorial Union
900 Asp. Ave. Norman, OK
Session # | Time | Session Title |
|---|---|---|
Introduction | 9:00 a.m. - 9:15 a.m. | Introduction and Welcome |
Session I | 9:15 a.m. - 10:45 a.m. | "The South Asian Origins of American Independence." “Lecture title TBD” |
Session II | 11:00 a.m. - 11:45 p.m. | "Exodus in 1776 and Beyond: The Untold Story of American Freedom" Susan McWilliams BarndtPomona College |
Lunch | 11:45 a.m. - 1:15 p.m. | In Molly Shi Boren Ballroom |
Session III | 1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. | "Thomas Jefferson, the Founding, and Generational Sovereignty" “Lecture title TBD” |
Session IV | 3:00 p.m. - 3:45 p.m. | Panel Discussion |
Pomona College
Presentation Title:
“Exodus in 1776 and Beyond: The Untold Story of American Freedom”
Susan McWilliams Barndt is the William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow in Government at Claremont McKenna College and a professor of politics at Pomona College, where she has won the Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching four times, and she currently serves as president/chair of the American Political Thought section of the American Political Science Association. She is the author of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought and Traveling Back, editor of A Political Companion to James Baldwin, and co-editor of multiple influential volumes on American political thought. McWilliams is also a co-editor of the American Political Thought book series at the University Press of Kansas and a former editor of the journal American Political Thought. Her work has been widely recognized with honors including the Graves Award in the Humanities, an NEH Fellowship, and the Jack Miller Center’s Teaching Excellence Award, and she frequently appears in major media outlets as a political commentator.
University of Virginia
Presentation Title:
“Thomas Jefferson, the Founding, and Generational Sovereignty”
Christa Dierksheide is Brockman Foundation Jefferson Scholars Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the author of Beyond Jefferson: The Hemingses, the Randolphs, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Yale, 2024) and Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas, 1770-1840 (Virginia, 2014). Her latest book, co-written with Nicholas Guyatt, is Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery (Harvard, 2026).
Hamilton School
Presentation Title:
"TBD"
Adam Lebovitz is a historian of political thought, specializing in the constitutional ideas of the late eighteenth century in America, Britain, and France. He holds a doctorate and a law degree from Harvard. Prior to coming to the Hamilton School, he held fellowships at a number of leading institutions, including University of Cambridge, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, New York University Law School, and the Harvard Law School. His research has been published, or is forthcoming, in venues such as the William and Mary Quarterly, the American Journal of Legal History, and the Cambridge History of Rights. His forthcoming first monograph, Colossus: Constitutional Theory in America and France, 1776-1799, documents the surprising extent to which American constitutional ideas and designs influenced the course of the French revolution. He has won numerous prizes, including the Leo Strauss Prize from the American Political Science Association, the Robert Noxon Toppan Prize from Harvard University, and the Montreal Political Theory Manuscript Award.
University of Chicago
Presentation Title:
"The South Asian Origins of American Independence"
Steve Pincus is the Thomas Donnelly Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is a historian of the British Empire and has written three monographs, including 1688: The First Modern Revolution and The Heart of the Declaration. He has just sent to press a fourth monograph tentatively entitled The Global British Empire to 1784. He has written widely on comparative revolutions, the history of political economy, and early modern politics and culture. He currently chairs the European Civilization sequence at the University of Chicago. In 2026-2027 he will serve as President of the Social Science History Association.
University of St Andrews
Presentation Title:
"TBD"
Richard Whatmore is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and co-director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History. He is Fellow of the British Academy. Whatmore works in the fields of the history of political thought and political economy from the 17th century to the present, with a focus on small states and free states, empire and commerce, liberty and fanaticism. Many of his books and articles have been concerned with 18th century Britain, France, small republics and new republics, including the United States. These include Republicanism and the French Revolution (Oxford, 2000), Against War and Empire (Yale, 2012), Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans (Princeton, 2019), The History of Political Thought. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2021) and The End of Enlightenment. Empire, Commerce, Crisis (Allen Lane, 2023).
