NEH Enduring Questions Course on Citizenship

FAIN: AQ-228863-15

Centre College of Kentucky (Danville, KY 40422-1309)
Sara Egge (Project Director: September 2014 to November 2019)

The development and teaching of a new undergraduate course on what it means to be a citizen.

What is a citizen? What are the meanings and forms of citizenship? This course will consider these questions from important philosophical works and more recent studies in the Western political tradition. We will examine philosophers like Aristotle, Kant, and Locke to understand classic interpretations of citizenship as well as more recent authors like Josiah Strong and Azouz Begag, who offered critiques of the practice of citizenship along the lines of race, ethnicity, culture, and gender. In the process, we will uncover how thinkers defined citizenship in the liberal and republican political traditions, how the American and French Revolutions tested and reshaped the boundaries of citizenship, and how native-born citizens, immigrants, and the state negotiated the process of naturalization. Our major goal is to compare the meanings of citizenship and the major forms of belonging in the Western tradition so that we can better understand our own identities within the nation-state.