People
Faculty
Dan Demetriou
Professor of Philosophy
Dan Demetriou is Professor of Philosophy at West Virginia University's Washington Center for Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Colorado Boulder and taught at the University of Minnesota Morris from 2009 to 2026. His research lies at the intersection of applied ethics and social and political philosophy, with particular interests in honor, nationalism, immigration, sex ethics, and moral psychology. He is co-editor, with Laurie Johnson, of Honor in the Modern World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and has published in journals including Philosophical Studies, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, the Journal of Ethics, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Social Theory and Practice, and Public Affairs Quarterly. His recent work examines offensive heritage in an era of globalization and mass migration, the moral claims surrounding war refugees, and the philosophical foundations of open-borders theory. Demetriou often draws on social science, comparative cultural experience, and political-economy approaches. He also writes public philosophy at Flyover Philosophy and is developing projects on emerging conservative thought, sex and nation, and nativism.
Eric Hewett
Assistant Professor of Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship
Dr. Eric Hewett is Assistant Professor of Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship at the Washington Center. He earned a joint Ph.D. in “Philosophy, Sciences and Culture of the Late Antique, Medieval and Humanistic Eras” from the University of Salerno in Italy and in “Patristic Sciences” from the Pontifical Patristic Institute Augustinianum in Vatican City in 2013. His dissertation, The Encounter of Art and Language in Hrabanus Maurus’ In Honorem Sanctae Crucis and the Communication of Philosophical and Theological Content, analyzes the formal and semantic structures of one of the most complex works of poetry ever composed, a product of the 9th-century Carolingian Renaissance. In 2016 the Society for Classical Studies honored him with its President’s Award for extraordinary service to the field of Classics. More recently, he has published on theological and philosophical aspects of contemporary debate within Roman Catholicism concerning the death penalty. Hewett will teach courses at the Washington Center on Ancient Rome, early Christianity, medieval Europe, and rhetoric. He is fluent or proficient in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Basque, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit, and is a published translator of Italian scholarly works and Basque poetry.
Josiah Lippincott
Assistant Professor of Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship
Dr. Josiah Lippincott is an Assistant Professor of Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship at the Washington Center. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Hillsdale College in 2026 and earned his M.A. and B.A. in Politics in 2022 and 2016, respectively.
Lippincott's research focuses on American political thought, classical and modern political philosophy, and the history of American foreign policy. His dissertation, To Match Slaughter with Greater Slaughter: FDR, the Pacific War, and the Birth of the New World Order, examines the transformation of American foreign-policy principles from the Founding through the Second World War, with particular attention to Franklin Roosevelt and the Pacific War.
Before beginning his academic career, Lippincott served from 2016 to 2020 as a United States Marine Corps artillery officer with 5th Battalion, 11th Marines, including a 2019 deployment to Okinawa through the Unit Deployment Program. He was a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute in 2020.
Patrick Lee Miller
Director
Patrick Lee Miller, Ph.D. is the founding Director of the Washington Center for Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship at West Virginia University. A specialist in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, Platonism, Nietzsche, and psychoanalysis, he holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Philosophy and an M.A. in Classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a degree in Psychoanalysis from the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Carolinas. He is the author of Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy (Continuum, 2011) and co-editor of Introductory Readings in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy (Hackett, 2015), and has published widely on figures ranging from Heraclitus and Plato to Nietzsche and Freud. His current research is on the roots of the American Constitution in ancient Greece and Rome. Prior to joining WVU, he served as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University for twenty years.
Staff
Rebecca Thacker
Project Manager
Dr. Rebecca Thacker is a native West Virginian and a lifelong Mountaineer. She has an undergraduate degree from WVU and an MBA and Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. She is a published author in both scholarly and practitioner journals. A belief in limited government and economic freedom propelled her into the political arena, where she served in President Donald Trump's first administration as Senior Advisor for Research and Evaluation at the Office of Personnel Management in Washington, DC. Upon leaving the federal government, Dr. Thacker served as the Associate Director of the Law & Economics Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University before returning to West Virginia and WVU.