Crina Archer
Crina Archer takes on political theory, radical democracy, American politics, and gender studies to study the concepts that shape our sense of community, our worldviews, and our individual practices.
Biography
A scholar of political theory, Archer grew up in New Hampshire and Massachusetts and pursued her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. At UCSC, she discovered the vocation of political theory and took a particular interest in radical democratic thought. Her graduate work at Northwestern University examined the afterlife of the category of “democratic progress” in liberal historical narratives of political revolution. She is the coeditor of Second Nature: Rethinking the Natural Through Politics (Fordham University Press, 2013) and coauthor of Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making: Mental Models, Milgram, and the Problem of Obedience (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
In addition to teaching courses in political science at Northwestern, Virginia Military Institute, and Eastern Mennonite University, Archer has written, researched, and taught extensively in the interdisciplinary fields of legal studies and business ethics. She served as a research assistant at the American Bar Foundation, co-created Northwestern’s Legal Field Studies program, and advised more than 60 undergraduate theses in Legal Studies at Northwestern, working with students individually throughout their brainstorming, research, and writing processes. She brings this mentoring experience to her courses by challenging students to rigorous investigation, in both classroom discussions and written work, of the stakes of canonical political texts and contemporary events for their communities, worldviews, and individual practices. Archer also served as a research fellow at DePaul University’s Institute for Professional and Business Ethics, where her work explored barriers to ethical decision-making in corporate practice. She was a visiting faculty member at Bennington from Fall 2014 through Spring 2017.