As a member of the Board of Advisers for the Committee on Social Studies, I have supervised the academic formation of over a dozen undergraduates. My responsibilities include giving guidance on course selection; overseeing curricular progress through the demanding requirements of Social Studies; and granting preliminary approval for interdisciplinary plans of study in the social sciences. While my own areas center around topics in philosophy and political theory, some of my advisees have profitably pursued a wide array of themes, from public health in Latin America to the political motivations behind the history of American musical theater. To pick out only a small sample, other topics have included the philosophical foundations of welfare economics, the intellectual context of 19th-century anarchism, and the aesthetic implications of Rousseau's political thought.
My duties in Social Studies also involve reading, reviewing, and grading senior theses - and serving as an examiner at the end-of-college oral defense required of every senior in the program. These oral defenses center both on an undergraduate's special area of research and on the history of social theory more generally. Relatedly, as an Academic Adviser, I work to prepare students to meet these demands.
During AY 2010-2011, I served as a workshop moderator - in Government 99 - for thesis-writers in political theory, for the Government Department. My responsibilities included reading and reviewing drafts of senior theses; organizing peer-review panels; and running introductory sessions on the various shapes and commitments that works in political theory - broadly understood - can take on: from "contextualist" forms of the history of political thought to more "textualist" approaches to philosophical reconstruction - from systematic normative theory to politically-engaged forms of criticism. I put special emphasis on the logical character of political theorists' distinctive claims, and on the methodological worries raised by them.
More recently, for Social Studies and Government, I have given occasional workshops for sophomores and juniors interested in combining empirical and normative research in their future projects.