Dr. Michael Signer, Visiting Full Professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, will deliver a free public lecture on Monday, Feb. 3 in Lee Hall, Room 411 at 4 p.m. The title of the lecture is “The Search for Statesmen: The Quest for Leadership in James Madison’s Democracy.” Dr. Signer’s biography is below.
Michael Signer is Lecturer in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the
University of Virginia and Visiting Full Professor at the School of Public and
International Affairs at Virginia Tech. The author of Demagogue: The Fight
to Save Democracy from its Worst Enemies (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), he is
currently at work on Becoming Madison: The Making of an American Statesman
(PublicAffairs 2015). He has written for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas,
Dissent, Democracy & Society, The Daily Beast, The Richmond Times-Dispatch,
The New Republic, and the Washington Post and has appeared on MSNBC,
Fox News, the BBC, and NPR. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the
University of California at Berkeley, where he was a National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellow, a J.D. from the University of Virginia, and a B.A. in
politics, magna cum laude, from Princeton University. He is the managing
principal of Madison Law & Strategy Group, PLLC and chairs the firm’s
Charlottesville office. He served as one of two counselors to Governor Mark
Warner in Richmond and was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for
Lieutenant Governor of Virginia in 2009. He is a member of the Board of
Directors of the Center for National Policy and is a Senior Fellow with the
Truman National Security Project. He lives in Charlottesville.
