Rate My Professor Jonathan Culp

Jonathan F. Culp, Ph.D., served as Associate Professor of Politics and Chair of the Politics Department at the University of Dallas from fall 2022 to spring 2025, having joined the institution in 2008 as an instructor, promoted to assistant professor, and then to associate professor in 2015. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston College in 2008, with a dissertation titled “Plato’s Critique of Injustice in the Gorgias and the Republic” advised by Christopher Bruell, and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, Annapolis, in 2001. Earlier teaching experience includes instructor and teaching assistant roles at Boston College from 2004 to 2007. Culp’s research centers on political philosophy, exploring themes in the works of Plato, David Hume, George Orwell, and others. Key publications include “Happy City, Happy Citizens? The Private Good and the Common Good in Plato’s Republic” in Interpretation (2015); “Who’s Happy in Plato’s Republic?” in Polis: The Journal of Ancient Greek Political Thought (2014); “Justice, Happiness, and the Sensible Knave: Hume’s Incomplete Defense of the Just Life” in Review of Politics (2013); “‘On Collingwood’s Philosophy of History’ and ‘On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy’” in Brill’s Companion to Leo Strauss’ Writings on Classical Political Thought (2015); and reviews such as David Ramsay Steele’s Orwell Your Orwell in Interpretation (2019) and Jacob Howland’s Glaucon’s Fate in Review of Politics (2019). He is completing a monograph, Orwell’s Humanity: Totalitarianism and the Limits of Humanism, which examines Orwell’s political thought, human nature, and the contradictions therein.

Culp received the Haggar Award for Teaching Excellence in 2025 and 2022; King/Haggar Scholar awards in summers of 2019, 2016, and 2011; Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Awards in 2006 and 2007; Bradley Dissertation Fellowship in 2007-2008; and Earhart Fellowships from 2004 to 2007. Additional research support includes the University of Dallas Class of 1988 Alumni Faculty Development Award (2015) and Koch Summer Research Grant (2014). He taught graduate seminars like Plato’s Republic (biannually 2008-2024), Modernity and Post-Modernity, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and George Orwell as Political Thinker, alongside undergraduate courses including Principles of American Politics (every semester 2008-2025), International Politics, Comparative Government/Politics, and Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. University service encompassed Faculty Senate membership (2016-2020, 2023-2024), chairing department search committees (2023-2025), directing the International Studies Concentration (2011-2025), undergraduate advising, and co-organizing Institute of Philosophic Studies colloquia. Professionally, he directed summer institutes for high school teachers on political philosophy and American politics (2018-2019), reviewed for American Political Science Review, Interpretation, Journal of Politics, and Review of Politics, and delivered public presentations such as “Predictions for American Politics in 2024” for the Dallas Forum and a panel on postliberalism.