Luke C. Sheahan is a 2026-2027 Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Duquesne University and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS) at the University of Pennsylvania. He researches the intersection of First Amendment rights and political theory. Sheahan’s scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in American Political Thought, The Political Science Reviewer, Humanitas, Anamnesis, and The Journal of Value Inquiry and he has lectured widely on religious liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. He is author of Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism (Amazon; Barnes and Noble), editor of International Comparative Approaches to Free Speech and Open Inquiry, and coeditor of two volumes on Freedom of Association. He is writing a second book tentatively titled “Freedoms Like a Fox: First Amendment Rights in the Plural Constitutional Community.”
From 2018-2019, Sheahan was Associate Director and Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Freedom Project at Wellesley College and from 2016-2018, Sheahan was a Postdoctoral Associate and Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. He received a PhD and MA in political theory from the Catholic University of America and a B.S. in political science from the Honors College at Oregon State University. He is a five-time recipient of the Humane Studies Fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies, a 2014 recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a 2018 recipient of the Leonard P. Liggio Memorial Fellowship, a 2022 recipient of the William Batchelder IV Prize for the Study of Place from the Ciceronian Society, a 2024 recipient of the Heritage Foundation’s Academic Prize, and a 2025 recipient of the Mickey Shapiro Fellowship for Free Speech.
