The Program

Through a wide range of courses in the social sciences and the humanities, Leadership Studies asks what leadership means within a wide variety of social contexts–whether in a family, a team, a theatre company, a philanthropy, a university, a multinational corporation, or a nation state waging war. Questions explored include:

  • How have men and women defined leadership and what are the bases of leaders’ legitimacy in different historical contexts?
  • What are the distinctive habits of mind of leaders in different historical contexts? What are the moral dilemmas that leaders in different contexts face?
  • How does one analyze the experiences of leaders in widely disparate contexts to generate systematic comparative understandings of why history judges some leaders great and others failures? How and why do these evaluations about the efficacy of leaders shift over time?

To meet the requirements of the concentration, students must complete one of two sequences: American foreign policy or leadership studies. Additional and/or substitute electives are offered each year; students should consult the course offerings in the catalog for the full list of elective offerings in a given year or check with the program chair, Justin Crowe, to see if other courses might count as electives.