Erika Bachiochi JD

Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar specializing in Equal Protection jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, and Catholic social teaching, and sexual ethics. A graduate of Middlebury College, Erika was a Bradley Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Politics at Boston College, received her law degree from Boston University School of Law, and spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. Her latest book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision was published by Notre Dame University Press in 2021. Erika is also a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Dr. Karen E. Bohlin

Karen E. Bohlin is a Research Affiliate at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program and Director of the Practical Wisdom Project at AAI. With more than two decades of leadership and teaching in both secondary and higher education, Dr. Bohlin's work explores the intersection of practical wisdom and leadership for flourishing. She teaches Practical Wisdom for Agile Leadership, an online executive education program that equips leadership teams to shape institutions committed to individual and collective flourishing. Author of several books and articles on applied virtue ethics, practical wisdom and the “schooling of desire,” she is a sought after speaker and leader of professional education workshops. Dr. Bohlin also serves as senior scholar at Boston University’s Center for Character & Social Responsibility, founder and director emerita of the LifeCompass Institute for Character & Leadership at Montrose School and advisory board member for the Kern Partners in Character and Educational Leadership (KPCEL).

DR. J. DAVID FRANKS

J. David Franks received his Ph. D. in systematic theology from Boston College, and was professor of sacred theology for almost a decade at St. John’s Seminary, where he co-founded the Theological Institute for the New Evangelization and its Catechetical Certificate program. An activist as well as an intellectual, David serves as Chairman of the Board for Massachusetts Citizens for Life, founding and directing its Lincoln Forum for Human Dignity, which advances a liberal-arts and high-culture approach to reigniting civic conversation. David is a doting and devoted father of six children.

Manuel Lopez

Manuel Lopez has taught political philosophy at Harvard and at the University of Chicago, after receiving his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. His J.D. thesis, as an NSF graduate fellow in political science, was on Alfarabi's analysis of the principles of the religious opinions underlying all societies. He has written on the effects of the democratic bias in justice on American social and legal institutions for several academic and law journals. He is also an entrepreneur in the futures industry, having served as principal and adviser of trading funds in Boston and Chicago.

Prof. Arthur Brooks

Arthur C. Brooks is the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. Before joining the Harvard faculty in July of 2019, he served for ten years as president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a public policy think tank in Washington, DC.

Miroslava Duranková

Miroslava is a co-founder and director of Great Works Academy - a program which enables students to better understand themselves and the world through reliving great stories of Western civilization and discussing them in the community and thus become heroes of their own flourishing story. She graduated from the Master Program in Character Education at the University of Birmingham (Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues) focusing her diploma at the moral imagination and character development through stories. She is a graduate of the university residential program Collegium of Anton Neuwirth (based in Slovakia), where she later worked as a director in 2014-2018.

Prof. Maura Jane Farrelly

Maura Jane Farrelly is associate professor and chair of American Studies at Brandeis University, where she also directs the Journalism Program. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Emory University, with an emphasis on religion and the colonial and early-American periods.

Farrelly is the author of Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her current research project is entitled Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: A Story of Mystery and Tragedy and the Closing of the American Frontier. It uses the lives of three people in Wyoming at the turn of the 20th century to explore a topic that touches the lives of many Americans today -- the right to be forgotten.

Iosif M. Gershteyn

Iosif M. Gershteyn is an entrepreneur and biotech executive in the immunology/oncology space, founding companies at the cutting edge of biology and medicine. As well as the 'how' of living (and not dying), he is equally passionate on the 'why' of living and has thus pursued philosophy, poetry, theater and literature as avenues towards experiential wisdom. 

Trained as a native speaker on Russian literature classics he pursued a directorial certificate at GITIS in 2013 , followed by graduate-level training on the Stanislavsky method as well as masterclasses directly at MXAT in 2016.

Prof. Jonathan Locke Hart

Jonathan Locke Hart is Associate, Harvard University Herbaria, and has also held appointments and visiting appointments at Kirkland House, the Departments of English and of Comparative Literature on and off since 1986. He is a poet, literary scholar and historian who also works on the history of ideas, culture and science. His current project here is on botany at Harvard.

Professor Hart is Chair Professor, School of Translation, Shandong University. He is also Senior Fellow, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, and Life Member, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He has taught and held visiting appointments in many places, including Princeton, Cambridge, Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Toronto and Peking University.

He is committed to students, to creativity and innovation and the liberal arts, working with students and colleagues in fine arts, science, social sciences and humanities.

Prof. Matthew Lee

Dr. Matthew Lee is Director of Empirical Research at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. He is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Health, Flourishing, and Positive Psychology at Stony Brook University’s Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics. He previously served as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity and as President of the North Central Sociological Association.

His research explores pathways to human flourishing, benevolent service to others, and the integration of social science and the humanities. He is currently co-editing a book for Oxford University Press on the interdisciplinary measurement of well-being.

Dr. ROBERT “Bobby” MARSLAND

Robert obtained his PhD in Physics from MIT in 2017, and now works as a lecturer and postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Physics at Boston University. He specializes in theoretical biophysics, studying collective phenomena in gene regulatory networks, metabolism and ecology. Alongside his scientific work, he is interested in understanding the proper relationship between physics and other branches of knowledge, particularly metaphysics and philosophy of nature. He has helped to facilitate three "Henry Adams Retreats" organized by AAI, bringing undergraduates together to discuss fundamental metaphysical questions and their implications for our lives as persons and as citizens.

Dr. Danilo Petranovich

Dr. Petranovich is the Director of the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previously, Dr. Petranovich taught political science at Duke University and Yale University.

His scholarly expertise is in nineteenth century European and American political thought, but his intellectual interests and loves are far more extensive. Dr. Petranovich received his B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard in 2000 and Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2007. He lives with his wife Cristiana and son Gabriel not too far from the Institute.

Prof. Francesco Piatti

Francesco "Chip" Piatti had over twenty-six years teaching at the Boston Architectural College and an intimate knowledge of the convergence of architecture and history. Prior to his appointment at BAC, he also taught at Curry College, Fisher College and Bunker Hill Community College. Apart from the areas of history and architecture Prof. Piatti is also regarded as an expert in theatrical arts, having taught courses in the same at both Curry and Fisher College.

Prof. Piatti was the Institute's senior adviser on visual arts programming.

Prof. Manuel Guillén

Manuel Guillén was Associate Professor of Management and Business Ethics at the University of Valencia (UV), Spain, and specialized in the area of leadership and trust in organizations. He was Founder and Director of the Institute for Ethics in Communication and in Organizations (IECO) and Director of the IECO-UV Chair of Business Ethics. Manuel served for eight years as General Secretary of the Spanish branch of the European Business Ethics Network (EBEN-Spain). He was a regular visiting researcher at Harvard University, where he was a Representative of the University of Valencia Grants Program.