About Us
CLAIRE SNYDER-HALL is a democratic theorist & writer-activist, who focuses on issues of power and resistance, including authoritarianism, militarism, political culture, gender & sexuality, civic engagement, social movements, and ideologies.
Claire recently received a Research Fellowship awarded by the Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Salisbury University to work on a political memoir about her experiences in state politics. An auto-ethnographic study, the book analyzes her grassroots campaign for state senate in 2014, the three years she chaired the Democratic Committee in her district, her work as a lobbyist for democracy reform in the General Assembly, her involvement with Democratic primary campaigns, and the progressive community-building work she participated in statewide.
Claire’s publications include Right-Wing Populism and the Media (2014), co-edited with Cynthia Burack; the award-winning Gay Marriage and Democracy: Equality for All (2006); and Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition (1999), as well as dozens of articles and essays on issues of concern to democrats, feminists, and progressives. She publishes regularly in local newspapers and used to blog weekly for Tikkun Daily.
Claire has spent the majority of her career in academia. She served as a tenure-line faculty member at George Mason University for twelve years, where she taught political philosophy, American political thought, democratic theory, and women & politics, and also directed a number of academic programs. Prior to that, she was an assistant professor at Illinois State University and has also taught courses at Hunter College, Rutgers University, and Princeton.
For almost 25 years, Claire has worked within the national civic engagement community. Since leaving academia, she served as Program Director for Common Cause Delaware for two years and Research Deputy for the Kettering Foundation for three years. Prior to that she was campus coordinator for the American Democracy Project at Mason, a service-learning instructor at Rutgers, an associate of the Kettering Foundation, and coordinator of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, under the direction of Dr. Benjamin R. Barber.
Claire holds a PhD in political science from Rutgers University and a BA cum laude from Smith College.
To invite Dr. Snyder-Hall to speak on your campus, please email claire.snyderhall@gmail.com.