Baylor Alum wins Freedom and Opportunity Award

July 8, 2024

Baylor alumnus Kevin J. Burns (PhD, ’17) was recently awarded a Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prize by the Heritage Foundation. These awards recognize academic work bearing on “broader questions around economic freedom, the dignity of the person, human flourishing, constitutional governance, and national sovereignty.” Burns won the prize in recognition of his current research on American political thought which focuses on the Constitutional Convention of 1787. 

Burns studied American politics and political theory at Baylor and a version of his dissertation has been published as William Howard Taft’s Constitutional Progressivism by the University Press of Kansas. He is co-editor, with fellow alumnus Jordan T. Cash (Michigan State), of Congressional Deliberation: Major Debates, Speeches, and Writings, 1774-2023 (Hackett, forthcoming July 2024). Burns and Cash also co-organize a monthly working group for Baylor graduate students and alumni who discuss and receive feedback on their current research projects in American politics.

Burns is a 2023-2024 Visting Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Since 2017 he has taught at Christendom College (Front Royal, Virginia), where he directed the Tocqueville Forum on Liberal Democracy. In fall 2024, he will be joining the Political Science Department of Benedictine College (Atchison, Kansas). He earned his PhD and MA from Baylor University and his BA from the University of Dallas.