Faculty at UW–Madison are involved in campus life in ways that go beyond teaching and research. A prime example is Daniel J. Kapust (open-topic senior fellow, 2019–2023; resident fellow, 2015–2016), who has just about completed his first year as Director of the College of Arts & Science’s Honors Program. Students enrolled in L&S Honors receive a variety of benefits, including more direct and focused interactions with faculty, often in small seminars or Honors sections of larger courses, the ability to work with the fantastic team of advisors in the program, and a variety of ways to encounter and carry out research. Dan is especially excited about the opportunity for students to conduct Honors theses, which entail highly motivated students working on an independent research project under the direction of a faculty member.
As Director, Dan hopes to continue to build on the work of his predecessors: Sabine Gross (Griebsch Bascom Professor Emerita, German, Nordic, and Slavic+) and Jenny Saffran (Rubinstein Professor, Psychology). “Both of them did fantastic work and have left me with a wonderful team of people to work with and a well-run and popular program with deep support in the College of Letters and Science,” said Dan. In addition, Dan has goals of increasing student exposure to and interaction with research across all L&S departments, as well as prioritizing an increase in in-person programming and community post-COVID.
This is not the first time Dan has taken on an administrative role within the university—previously, he was Director of the Integrated Liberal Studies Program and is currently the Judith Hicks Stiehm Chair in Political Theory in the Political Science Department. When asked about what he likes about these roles, Dan cited a few factors: “first, the ability to identify a concrete problem and work to address it with others; second, to work with students, especially undergraduates; third, to learn about and focus on matters related to curriculum and pedagogy. Being a faculty member in a humanistic social science means that my research tends to be a solo affair, so I very much enjoy also having the opportunity to work on problems collaboratively and to learn from the experience and expertise of those I have the opportunity to work with.” But beyond this, it’s the interaction between these roles and his research that engages him: “with ILS, I’m interested in cross-disciplinary liberal arts education that bridges a range of disciplines, so ILS was a great opportunity in that regard; with Honors, the same set of interests were part of my motivation to apply.”
Taking on administrative roles that are connected to his research has practical value as well. Dan is the first to admit that balancing his many roles is tricky, but by finding a thematic through-line between them, Dan has found that they can be symbiotic. “I try to find ways to connect my teaching and research so that work done in one domain translates into the other,” he said. Dan continues to work on his book, The Tragedy of the Imperial Republic: Narrative, Exceptionalism, and the Fate of Republican Self-Rule, a project he pursued during his open-topic senior fellowship in which he argues that the narratives legitimizing republican self-rule enable and legitimize republican empire. Though the book takes up much of his research time, Dan is looking forward to working on two additional projects in the spring, one on the concept of right (ius) in Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of Things; the other on Adam Smith, rhetoric, and populism.
Dan recalls his time at IRH as fruitful, having benefited “both in terms of conversations with scholars with expertise on particular figures or periods that feature in [his] book and in terms of scholars working more broadly on related issues.” Yet to speak only of professional development would be to minimize Dan’s impression on IRH—to this day, he remains the reigning Bananagram champion. But these days, he’s trying his hand at other games, like Uno: “it’s a classic, it’s fun, and my son, with whom I play, is not only immeasurably better at it than I am, but he also takes real joy in trouncing me!” We welcome Dan back, at any time, to defend his Bananagram title or coach us in Uno at our Thursday Humani-teas.