Written by: William Gleason II
New school years come with fresh faces, daunting new classes, new anticipations, but also new professors.
Dr. Abigail Staysa is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Notre Dame. This is her first semester teaching at the University of Texas at Austin and she has joined the community of scholars at the Civitas Institute. The purpose of this institute at UT is to “prepare civic-minded leaders through the study of the ideas and institutions that sustain a free society.” The institute has widely been criticized by faculty and students for its politically motivated, right-wing affiliation.**
Staysa’s course, “The Classical Quest for Justice” (GOV 351C / CTI 320), is listed among the many courses offered by the Civitas Fellows. This course explores the never-ending discussion on what justice is and it’s relation to human nature through close-reading classical texts of the Ancient Greek world. The primary sources used in class discussion include Sophocles’ Antigone, Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, Xenophon’s Regime of the Lacedaemonians, Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Plato’s Republic, and Aristotle’s Politics. Dr. Staysa’s lectures masterfully tie each of the works together to explore the different interpretations of the nature of justice, how these interpretations shape and are shaped by political regimes, and what guidance human nature can offer.
Dr. Staysa has agreed to take part in an interview to discuss her welcome to UT Austin and her contribution to the Civitas Institute. Her responses are recorded below:
Before we start, I wanted to provide some background information on her academic and personal profiles:
Dr. Stasya is a Postdoc in the Civitas Institute and Lecturer in Government. She specializes in ancient political philosophy. Prior to coming to the University of Texas-Austin, she held a research postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University in 2022-2023. She earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2022, where she completed a dissertation on the political philosophy of Aristotle. Staysa’s research interests include the nature and limitations of legislation, education, and practical judgment in the history of political philosophy. This semester she is teaching the Classical Quest for Justice in the Government Department and Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas.
WG: As a first-year longhorn professor, how has your transition been to the 40 acres so far?
DS: The heat is a big adjustment from the northeast and midwest! In general, it has been a very positive experience to join the conversation in political philosophy at UT and to meet many bright undergraduate students, faculty members, and graduate students.
WG: As a recent addition to the Civitas Institute, would you mind providing us a brief description of this program?
DS: The Civitas Institute is an interdisciplinary group of scholars dedicated to studying the foundational ideas and institutions of a healthy society. Each scholar carries out his or her own independent research project, and we convene weekly for a research colloquium. The overall mission of the program is to “facilitate inquiry into the foundational principles of a free and enduring society: individual rights and civic virtue, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and free enterprise and markets.”
WG: What role do you assume in this program and how does your work contribute to the overall mission of the fellowship?
DS: My postdoctoral fellowship at Civitas is a research fellowship. I am working on a book-length study of Aristotle’s intricate treatment of pleasure and pain in his discussion of moral virtue and prudence in the Nicomachean Ethics. The main question of my book concerns the nature of moral education, the manner in which the moral virtues interact with pleasures and pains, and how this is essential to the operation of prudence. The project departs from prior studies of Aristotle by focusing more directly than is usual on the relationship between practical intellect with our experiences of pleasures and pains. The project also develops Aristotle’s argument that there is a good order of the human soul, that it accords with what is natural, and that this is itself evidence for a kinship of the mind and world, a theoretical question that is important to his overall philosophy. My research contributes to the general conversation and mission of the Civitas Institute by bringing classical political philosophy to bear on our contemporary understanding of human freedom, moral education, and legislation broadly understood.
Barely a month into the school year, Dr. Staysa has already committed to performing an extraordinary job at contributing to the scholarly conversation down in the Lone Star State. By prompting her students to investigate our ordinary opinions about justice–opinions that we may mistakenly presume to be knowledge–we too can become wise like Socrates. We welcome Dr. Staysa to the 40 acres and hope the best for her for the remainder of this school year and the years to come!
**Further reading about the program may be found at: https://civitas.utexas.edu/
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/04/ut-system-civitas-institute-college/
The Liberator Magazine 
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