Leadership

A. James McAdams is the William M. Scholl Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He served as Director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame from 2002-2018. His latest book, Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party, is the first comprehensive history of the communist party, a revolutionary institution that represented the greatest challenger to liberal democracy for over 150 years. Vanguard of the Revolution examines the political history of the communist party from the 1840s to the present. In addition, McAdams has written widely on European affairs, especially concerning communism in Eastern Europe, and is an internationally recognized scholar of the two-state period in modern German history (1949-1989) and its aftermath. McAdams is currently writing about the ideas of European Far Right intellectuals in the era of right-wing populism and their efforts to transform basic liberal democratic principles. He has received multiple teaching awards at Notre Dame, and he was the first political science professor to receive the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German Studies.