Richard Rodgers

Richard Rodgers is a junior at Harvard College pursuing a concentration in History and a secondary in Medieval Studies. His scholarly interests include medieval political philosophy, political theology, and the reception and transmission of classical and Christian statecraft—the moral and metaphysical foundations of rule, the shape of legitimate imperium, and the ordering of law, virtue, and the common good—especially the conceptual vocabularies of sovereignty, legitimacy, regime, jurisdiction, and political order. His recent work examines how medieval materials are mobilized in modern political argument, particularly the Arthurian tradition’s role in nationalism and the way national myth supplies moral language and historical warrant for imperial projects. He also studies the Avignon papacy as a crisis of ecclesial authority and political theology, with an eye to how competing claims of universal authority and territorial power recast the terms of legitimacy and governance. He is the George Andrew Kellner Fellow at the Harvard Catholic Forum and a John Aroutiounian Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute, where he pursues research in Catholic intellectual history and the history of political thought and moral economy. Please reach out to talk about medieval history, philosophy, theology, or research ideas.