Michelle T. Clarke
Associate Professor
Appointments
Associate Professor of Government
Area of Expertise
History of political thought,
Machiavelli,
Roman political thought,
Renaissance political thought
Biography
I study the history of political thought, with an emphasis on the movement of classical ideas into the modern world. My first book, Machiavelli's Florentine Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2018), examines Machiavelli's challenge to the way that earlier humanists had narrated the rise and fall of republican politics in his home city of Florence. My articles have also spanned a number of topics related to liberty, including what it means to be free, how true freedom is won and lost, and why it's generally so difficult to maintain. In the course of exploring these questions, I've found myself drawn again and again to materials that reflect my own sense that political theory, done properly, refuses to abstract from the messy, inconvenient, and often distasteful realities of political life. For Machiavelli, as for me, the work of political theory is to guide us through this world, mindful of the possibility that it may speak to us in a different voice than moral philosophy.
Education
Ph.D. Yale University
M. Phil. Yale University
M.A. Yale University
B.A. Tufts University
Taught Courses
Publications
Michelle T. Clarke. Machiavelli's Florentine Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Michelle T. Clarke. "Liberty, the People, and Republican Constitutionalism in Cicero's Pro Rabirio perduellionis reo," POLIS: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 1, no. 9 (2025): 9-28.
Michelle T. Clarke, "Boni Gone Bad: Cicero's Critique of Epicureanism in De Finibus I and II," POLIS: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 40, no. 1 (2023): 25-43.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Curing Virtue: Epicureanism and Erotic Fantasy in Machiavelli's Mandragola," Political Theory 50, no. 6 (2022): 913-938.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Machiavelli's Virtuous Princes: Rhetoric, Power, and the Politics of Ironic Historiography." Journal of Politics 84, no. 1 (2022): 483-495.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Style is the Man Himself: Eloquence and the Revival of Roman Virtue in Renaissance Humanism," Good Society 31, no. 1-2 (2022): 150-157.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Machiavelli: Menace to Societas" in The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory, ed. Daniel Kapust and Gary Remer. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Machiavelli's Political Thought," Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science (with Vickie Sullivan), 27 July 2016.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Machiavelli and the Imagined Rome of Renaissance Humanism," History of Political Thought 36, no. 3 (2015): 452-470.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Doing Violence to the Roman Idea of Liberty? Freedom as Bodily Integrity in Roman Political Thought," History of Political Thought 35, no. 2 (2014): 211 – 233.
Michelle T. Clarke. "The Mythologies of Contextualism: Method and Judgment in Skinner's Visions of Politics," Political Studies 61, no. 4 (2013): 317-329.
Michelle T. Clarke. "The Virtues of Republican Citizenship in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy," Journal of Politics 75, no. 2 (2013): 317 – 329.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Uprooting Nebuchadnezzar's Tree: Bacon's Criticism of Machiavellian Imperialism," Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2008): 367 – 378.
Michelle T. Clarke. "On the Woman Question in Machiavelli," Review of Politics 67, no. 2 (2005): 229 – 256.
Works in Progress
The Oxford History of Political Thought: The Renaissance, 1400-1517 (book project, under contract)
Contact