Fellowship Program

One of the Center’s cornerstone programs is the Resident Fellowship.  This unique and multidisciplinary fellowship brings together civilian academics and military professionals to study a timely topic relevant to military operations.  The fellows participate in a weekly research seminar, conduct independent and joint research, serve as guest instructors to the Midshipmen, travel to meet with other experts in the field, publish their analyses in journals and books, produce instructional materials for the Academy curriculum, and make presentations at the Academy and other national and international forums.

The Center advertises widely each year for Resident Fellowship candidates, and the Center’s Dean of Research and Director of the Office of Research and Scholarship in Ethics review all submitted applications.  The Center selects three Resident Fellows each year.

The Stockdale Center Resident Fellowship has helped launch academic careers for several of its newly-minted Ph.D. fellows, including: Dr. Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco (Grand Valley State University), Dr. Adam Betts (Bloomsburg University), Dr. Doyle Hodges (Texas National Security Review), Dr. Andrew Bell (Indiana University), Dr. Michael Robillard (University of Notre Dame), Dr. Ashleen Bagnulo (Texas State University), Dr. Jesse Kirkpatrick (George Mason University), Dr. Bradley Strawser (Naval Postgraduate School) and Dr. Valerie Morkevicius (Colgate University).

 Apply to the Fellowship Program for 2021-2022

Academic Year 2023-24 Research Effort

The 2024 McCain Conference topic More information coming soon.

In addition to this year's fellows, the following Stockdale staff are participating in this year’s work:

• Dr. Ed Barrett, Director of Strategy and Research, Stockdale Center, U.S. Naval Academy
• Dr. David Luban, the Distinguished Chair of Ethics, Stockdale Center, U.S. Naval Academy
• Mr. Mitt Regan, Senior Research Fellow, Stockdale Center, U.S. Naval Academy    

Current Fellows

Generously funded by USNA Classes of 1958 1962, 1973 and by a 10 year gift of support from Donald and Beverly Freeman.

Mr. Graeme Wood - Senior Research Fellow, Donald and Beverly Freeman Fellow

Graeme Wood is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His book The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State (Random House, 2017) was a Foreign Affairs “Best Book of the Year” and won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. It has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, and Arabic. Wood was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (2015-2016), a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House (2018), and a lecturer at The George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. He is a non-resident fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism and King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has taught at Yale since 2014.

Dr. Dustin Sebell - USNA Class of 1962 Fellow

Dustin Sebell is Associate Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University, where he studies and teaches the history of political philosophy, and where he is also Co-Director of the LeFrak Forum and the Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy. Previously, he was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University. His first book, The Socratic Turn: Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science, was published in 2016 by the University of Pennsylvania Press and won the Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science. His second book, Xenophon’s Socratic Education: Reason, Religion, and the Limits of Politics, was published in 2021 also by the University of Pennsylvania Press. His work on ancient and modern political philosophy has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Political Science Reviewer, and the Review of Politics.

Dr. William Galston - USNA Class of 1958 Fellow

William A. Galston holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a Senior Fellow. Prior to January 2006 he was the Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, founding director of the Center for Information
and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), and executive director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, co-chaired by former Secretary of Education William Bennett and former Senator Sam Nunn. Dr. Galston is the author of nine books and hundreds of articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics. His most recent books is Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (Yale, 2018). A winner of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award, Galston was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. Galston has appeared on all the principal television networks and is frequently interviewed on NPR. He writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Bradley Lewis - USNA Class of 1973 Fred Minier Resident Ethics Fellow

Bradley Lewis specializes in political and legal philosophy, especially in classical Greek political thought and in the theory of natural law. He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. He has published scholarly articles in Polity, History of Political Thought, the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Communio, the Josephinum Journal of Theology, the Pepperdine Law Review, the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, and the Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, as well as chapters in a number of books.  He is currently working on a book project provisionally titled “The Common Good and the Modern State.” He is also a fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology and serves as associate editor of the American Journal of Jurisprudence.