Fellows
The Elm Institute’s Fellows contribute to and collaborate with the intellectual life of the Institute.
Gregory M. Collins
Yale University
Gregory M. Collins is a Lecturer in the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics and Department of Political Science at Yale University. He is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the EP&E Program. Greg’s book on Edmund Burke’s economic thought, titled Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. His scholarly and teaching interests include political theory, the intellectual origins of liberalism and conservatism, the philosophical and ethical foundations of capitalism, constitutional theory and practice, and African-American political thought. Greg has published peer-reviewed articles and chapters on Burke, Adam Smith, Aristotle, Frederick Douglass, F.A. Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Britain’s East India Company, and the political philosophy of taxation. His popular writings can be found in Fusion, Law & Liberty, Modern Age, National Affairs, National Review, and University Bookman. Greg’s current book project is a study of the idea of civil society in early African-American political thought. Greg won the 2024 Lux et Veritas Faculty Prize, awarded annually to a Yale faculty member who promotes intellectual variety in and out of the classroom; and the Acton Institute’s 2020 Novak Award, awarded annually to one junior scholar who conducts research on the intersection of liberty and virtue. Greg received his MA and PhD in Politics from The Catholic University of America in 2017 and his B.A. in Political Science from UMass Amherst in 2009. He is married to his college sweetheart and has two young daughters (with a third on the way!). In his free time Greg enjoys rooting for Boston professional sports teams, playing Scrabble and chess, and beating his students at pickup basketball.
Mordechai Levy-Eichel
Yale University
Mordechai is a lecturer in the Political Science Department and Humanities Program at Yale, where he hides his formal academic identity as a historian, and his escapades as a critic, and general scholarly skeptic of scholarship. He primarily works on the history and philosophy of learning and education, having had a fairly idiosyncratic education himself, ranging from various yeshivot to homeschooling to the University of Chicago. Trained as an early modern Atlantic and European historian who somehow often spends his time exploring the bowels of nineteenth-century America, he is writing an episodic history on the rise of the modern university and the research ideal. He has published both in academic journals and in popular magazines, ranging from Intellectual History Review to Tablet to the Chronicle of Higher Education. His dissertation on the spread of early modern mathematical learning was awarded the Elizabethan Prize for “outstanding work on literature, arts, or culture of the Renaissance,” and in 2022 he was the inaugural winner of the Lux et Veritas faculty teaching award which “recognizes a Yale faculty member who actively fosters intellectual diversity for students in and out of the classroom.” When the spirit moves him, he posts at antieducation.substack.com.
Danilo Petranovich
Abigail Adams Institute
Danilo Petranovich (G’07) is the Director of Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Petranovich has taught political science at Duke and Yale Universities, where he offered courses on liberalism and conservatism in the United States, American political thought, the American presidency, ethical leadership, nationalism and patriotism, and the history of Western political philosophy, as well as two seminars on William F. Buckley’s role in American politics (Dr. Petranovich served for seven months as Bill Buckley’s amanuensis). Dr. Petranovich is currently writing a book (under contract with Yale University Press) about the three-decade duel between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, which resulted, he argues, in a transformation of American nationhood. He received his BA from Harvard and his PhD in Political Science from Yale.