Rank Professor, American Civilization

The University of Austin (UATX) educates citizens and leaders capable of assuring national prosperity and the success of constitutional liberty. We seek talented, energetic, and productive individuals to help us develop America’s newest university into an inspiring model of best practices in student formation. Ideal candidates will be passionate about teaching, eager to innovate, and committed to reforming higher education.

The Center for Arts at UATX invites applications for full- or part-time faculty positions in American history, thought, and culture, open to candidates at any academic rank, to contribute to its growing Program in American Civilization.

We seek historians and cultural critics who can guide students toward a comprehensive understanding of America across its intellectual, political, economic, religious, literary, and artistic dimensions. Successful candidates will be first-rate teachers and accomplished scholars who approach America’s past with seriousness, independence of mind, and a willingness to engage timely and timeless questions about American national character.

We welcome applications from historians and cultural critics specializing in any period of American history, including colonial America, the Founding, the early republic, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and the twentieth century. We are particularly interested in faculty members who can tell the American story with moral seriousness and narrative power. The strongest candidates will share the Program’s commitment to seeing American civilization as a coherent whole rather than a collection of disconnected fragments.

The Program in American Civilization at the University of Austin (UATX) studies America as a distinct civilization and seeks to form citizens capable of sustaining it. The Program begins from the conviction that America is more than a political system or an institutional blueprint: it is a civilization constituted by ideals, sustained by institutions, and animated by a distinct culture.

For this reason, the Program approaches the study of America through three mutually reinforcing dimensions. Ideals encompass the principles at the heart of the American experiment, including liberty, equality, natural rights, freedom of religion, and government by consent. Institutions are the means by which abstract ideals acquire concrete social and political form, encompassing not only the Constitution, Congress, and the courts, but also families, churches, schools, and voluntary associations.

Culture consists of the stories by which Americans develop an attachment to their national inheritance, as expressed in sermons, novels, poems, paintings, rhetoric, customs, music, films, and other traditions.

These dimensions are intentionally studied together. Students encounter history, politics, philosophy, religion, literature, and art not as isolated disciplines but as facets of a single national identity.

The Program contributes three courses to UATX's core curriculum:
The American Founding, American Frontiers, and The American Century. Together, these courses introduce all undergraduates to the American experience, from the colonial period and Founding through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students wishing to pursue a deeper study of America may continue into the Concentration in American Civilization, which offers interdisciplinary courses and advanced seminars in American history, politics, philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts.

All students at the University of Austin complete a core curriculum, Intellectual Foundations, that includes ten courses on Western civilization and three courses on American civilization, as well as courses on mathematics,…