Gregory Collins

Gregory M. Collins is a Lecturer in the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics and Department of Political Science at Yale University. He is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the EP&E Program. Greg’s book on Edmund Burke’s economic thought, titled Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. His scholarly and teaching interests include political theory, the philosophical and ethical foundations of markets, constitutional theory and practice, and African-American political thought. His articles and chapters on Burke, Adam Smith, Aristotle, Frederick Douglass, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Britain’s East India Company, and the political philosophy of taxation have been published in American Political Thought, Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Journal of Markets & Morality, Perspectives on Political Science, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Political Science Reviewer, Review of Politics, and Slavery & Abolition.

Greg won the Buckley Institute’s 2024 Lux et Veritas Faculty Prize for fostering intellectual variety in and out of the classroom; and the Acton Institute’s 2020 Novak Award, awarded annually to one junior scholar who conducts research on the intersection of liberty and virtue. His current book project is a study of the idea of civil society in early African-American political thought. Greg is also compiling an anthology on the intellectual origins of liberalism and conservatism, for which he is writing an introductory essay.

Greg received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from The Catholic University of America in 2017 and his B.A. in Political Science from UMass Amherst in 2009. He is married to his college sweetheart and has two young daughters. In his free time Greg enjoys rooting for Boston professional sports teams, playing Scrabble and chess, and beating his students at pickup basketball.