Russell L. Hanson, former Chair of the Department of Political Science and long time faculty member of our department, passed away on November 8. Russ chaired the department for six years and also served other units on campus during his tenure at Indiana. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1982 and taught at Indiana until his retirement in 2017. His main work focused on the intersection of political philosophy and American politics, with special emphasis on the historical development of liberalism, democracy, federalism, and social welfare policy in the United States. In his work, Russ also studied U.S. social reformers after the Civil War, and their intellectual and political ties to liberal counterparts in Victorian London. Russ taught a variety of courses on American political ideas as well as modern political thought. He was the author of The Democratic Imagination in America (1985), and the co-editor of Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (1989), Reconsidering the Democratic Public (1993), and Politics in the American States (2003).
The College of Arts