Andreas Avgousti is a PhD candidate in political theory (ABD). Prior to his arrival at Columbia he attained a BSc in Government & History and an MSc in Political Theory, both from the London School of Economics. In course for his MPhil at Columbia he minored in Philosophy.

PhD Dissertation: ‘Theorizing Reputation'. The dissertation is foremost an attempt to identify and conceptualize reputation via an engagement with ancient Greek thought. The constellation of understandings of reputation in democratic Athens helps us theorize a concept that is understudied in contemporary political theory and has gone unstudied in scholarship on the ancient Greeks. The dissertation is interdisciplinary in character: it involves an examination of the uses of reputation in other fields such as international relations and behavioral economics, while it looks at current debates about ‘character' in moral psychology and virtue theory.

Advisers: Professors David Johnston (Political Science), Melissa Schwartzberg (Political Science), and Katja Vogt (Philosophy).

Research Interests: ancient political and philosophical thought; moral psychology.

Teaching Assistantships at Columbia University

- Freedom of Speech and Press         

- Theories of the Political Self

- Political Theory I (twice)                 

- Plato (Philosophy Department)                                                                   

- Liberty and Empire

Syllabi

- Human Nature in Western Political Thought (advanced undergrad survey course). I will be teaching this course at Columbia University's Summer Session of 2012.

Working Papers

- ‘Pre-modern, Modern, and Natural Understandings of Man: Plato, Hobbes, and Evolutionary Theory' (Presented at the University of Toronto, 2009.)

- ‘The Search for Stability via a Marriage of Nature with Politics: An Understanding of Ciceronian Political Thought'. Under review. (Presented at Columbia University, 2010 and MPSA, 2011.)

Publications

- ‘By Uniting, it Stands: Poetry and Myth in Plato's "Republic"'. Forthcoming in ‘Polis', 2012. (Presented at NPSA, 2011.)

- ‘The Indigenous Foreigner: British Policy in Cyprus 1963-1965', The Cyprus Review, 21:2, 2009, pp. 123-144. Reprinted in Faustmann, H. & Solomou, E. (eds.) Independent Cyprus 1960-2010, University of Nicosia Press, Nicosia, 2011.