Meet the Speaker: Jed Atkins

Jed Atkins came to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in March 2024 to become the inaugural director and dean of the School of Civic Life and Leadership. Previously, he was at Duke University, where he had been a member of the faculty since 2009. There he was director of Duke’s Civil Discourse Project, which sponsored scholarly activities that promote engaged discourse with the goal of creating intellectually diverse communities, and also faculty director of the Transformative Ideas Program for sophomores, which includes an initiative on civic life and thought. He also chaired the classical studies department and was an associate professor of philosophy and political science.

Atkins is a scholar of Greek and Roman political and moral philosophy, the history of political thought, and contemporary debates on tolerance, civility and civil discourse. He is the author of Roman Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason: The Republic and Laws (Cambridge University Press 2013) and editor (with Thomas Bénatouïl) of the Cambridge Companion to Cicero’s Philosophy. His next book, The Christian Origins of Tolerance, will be published in October 2024 by Oxford University Press.

He earned his M. Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History and Ph.D. in Classics, both from the University of Cambridge, and his A.B. in government and classics from Bowdoin College.