Chase Mendoza

Areas of Interest: Renaissance Political Theory; Utopian and Dystopian Political Theory; History of Political Thought; Religion and Politics; Political Imagination in Literature and Politics

Chase Mendoza is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is primarily interested in the emergence of Utopian political thought during the Renaissance and the use of political imagination in literature and politics. He is also interested in the relationship between religion and politics from the ancients to the moderns.

Prior to coming to Notre Dame, Mr. Mendoza taught honors classes in English, Philosophy, and Politics at a college preparatory school in Chandler, Arizona. In one of the three classes he taught, he surveyed the works of early modern political theorists (e.g., Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau). Mr. Mendoza also surveyed the literature, philosophy, and history of ancient Greece from the Trojan War to the Persian Wars through the works of Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle. Additionally, the senior level course Mr. Mendoza taught focused primarily on philosophy and modern literature ranging from Vergil to Hegel. Before teaching at a college preparatory academy, Mr. Mendoza received a B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy from Pepperdine University where he wrote two theses on rational choice theory in congressional politics as well as psychological naturalism within the debates around free will and determinism.