Dr. Damon Linker is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Penn. He joined the department in the Fall of 2023 after having taught in the Critical Writing Program on several occasions since 2007. He writes the subscription newsletter “Notes from the Middleground” at Substack, is a Senior Fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center in Washington D.C., and is a weekly participant on the “Beg to Differ” podcast at The Bulwark. He is the author of The Theocons (Doubleday/Anchor) and The Religious Test (Norton), and a former senior correspondent (thrice-weekly columnist) at The Week. As a consulting editor at Penn Press, Linker acquired academic and commercial books in political theory, intellectual history, and current affairs. He has also worked as a senior editor at Newsweek / The Daily Beast and First Things. Linker’s essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Review of Politics, The Review of Metaphysics, American Behavioral Scientist, and other publications. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Michigan State University and has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Earhart Foundation.
Dr. Linker’s research and writing focuses on modern conservatism, the evolution of the Republican Party, the religious right, reactionary thought, the rise of right-wing populism around the globe starting in the mid-2010s, and related topics. He is at work on a book for Yale University Press on the life, thought, and contentious legacy of Leo Strauss.