David Ciepley

Global Horizons Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia, Charlottesville

David Ciepley is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the Univer-
sity of Virginia, and publishes in the fields of democratic theory, liberal theory, and corporate theory.
In 2001, he received his PhD in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and,
after a series of postdoctoral positions, served as Assistant and then Associate Professor of Political
Science at the University of Denver, from 2007 to 2019. He has held a variety of national and inter-
national fellowships, including at McGill University in Montreal as a Fulbright Scholar, at the Institute
for Advanced Study at Princeton, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at
Stanford.

He is the author of Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (2006); “Beyond Public and Private:
Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation” (APSR 2013); and “Is the U.S. Government a Corpo-
ration? The Corporate Origins of Modern Constitutionalism” (APSR 2017). His current book project,
Constitutional Democracy and the Corporation, explores whether a corporate economy is, or can be
made, compatible with constitutional democracy. Towards this end, it reconstructs the common
corporate origins of modern constitutional democracy and the business corporation, relates their
changing relations over time, and explores politically viable alternatives to the stockholder-dominated
corporation, which is proving incompatible with constitutional democracy.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2020-21.