Lucas Morel

“Lincoln and Liberty: Wisdom for the Ages”

Lucas Morel is the Class of 1960 Professor of Ethics and Politics and Head of the Politics Department at Washington and Lee University. He teaches American government, political philosophy, constitutional law, black American politics, and politics and literature, with research interests in Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Ellison. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the Claremont Graduate University and a B.A. cum laude from Claremont McKenna College.

He is a past president of the Abraham Lincoln Institute, trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society, and board member of the Abraham Lincoln Association. He has consulted on exhibits at the Library of Congress on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. He has conducted history workshops for high school teachers throughout the country and co-written lessons on antebellum and Civil War America and the modern Civil Rights Movement for the EDSITEment website of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, First Things, and Richmond Times-Dispatch.

He is the author of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government (2000) and editor of Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to “Invisible Man” (2004). He just published an edited volume of scholarly essays entitled Lincoln and Liberty: Wisdom for the Ages (2014), and is a contributing co-editor of The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century (under review by University Press of Mississippi).