Biographical Information
Josh Vandiver (Harvard AB, Princeton PhD) is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He primarily teaches American and European political theory and constitutional law. His research centers on classical Greece and Rome, classical reception in modernity, and contemporary extremist movements.
Dr Vandiver has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, Political Theory, Politics, Religion & Ideology, the Journal of Illiberalism Studies, the Journal for the Study of Radicalism (JSR), and several edited volumes. In 2024–25, he was guest co-editor for three issues of the JSR.
A fifth-generation Coloradan, he was born in La Junta and raised in the town of Swink. He began his undergraduate education at Colorado College, where he fell in love with the classics, medieval and Renaissance history, and the discipline of political theory. After transferring, he completed his AB in Government at Harvard College, then went on to New College, Oxford University, as the Lord Harlech Fellow before completing his MA and PhD in Politics at Princeton University.
Dr Vandiver is the departmental pre-law advisor and a member of the advisory boards of the Center for Legal Studies and the Heller Center for Arts and Humanities. He is an affiliate scholar at the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual (CSGI), for which he edited and published in 2025 The Essential Colorado Constitution, the first pocket-sized edition of the state constitution.
Publications
2025
What Do Masculinists Want? Virile Vanguards, Identitarians, and Evolian Political Theology. Journal for the Study of Radicalism 19 (2) (forthcoming)
Strategic Culture and the Masculinist Right: The Popular Geopolitics of Man’s World. Journal of Illiberalism Studies (forthcoming)
2024
Constitutional Conspiracism: Aryans, Alpha Chads, and White Nationalists. In L. Ritter (Ed.), American Conspiracism: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (pp. 212–233). Routledge.
Hard Men, Hard Money, Hardening Right: Bitcoin, Peter Thiel, and Schmittian States of Exception. In A. J. McAdams & S. Piccolo (Eds.), Far-Right Newspeak and the Future of Liberal Democracy (pp. 205–230). Routledge.
2023
Guerrilla and Cognitive Warfare in Transnational Left-wing Extremism. In J. P. Zúquete (Ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Left-wing Extremism (pp. 121–140). Palgrave Macmillan.
Masculinist Identitarians, Strategic Culture, and Eurocene Geopolitics. In J. P. Zúquete & R. Marchi (Eds.), Global Identitarianism (pp. 175–196). Routledge.
2022
“Apollo Has Saved Us!” Global Ambition and Metapolitical Warfare in Alt-Right Religion. Journal for the Study of Radicalism 16 (1), pp. 135–182.
2021
Metapolitics, Masculinity, and Technology in the Rise of “Bronze Age Pervert.” In A. J. McAdams & A. Castrillon (Eds.), Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy (pp. 242–263). Routledge.
2020
Alt-Virilities: Masculinism, Rhizomatics, and the Contradictions of the American Alt-Right. Politics, Religion & Ideology, 21 (2), pp. 153–176.
2018
The Radical Roots of the Alt-Right. In Political Extremism and Radicalism in the Twentieth Century. Gale Cengage.
2016
Plato in Folsom Prison: Eldridge Cleaver, Black Power, Queer Classicism. Political Theory, 44 (6), pp. 764–796.
2014
Xenophon contra Plato: Citizen Motivation and Socratic Biography. Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 31 (1), pp. 74–102.
Teaching
PSC 1100: The American Political System
PSC 3090: Extremist Political Movements
PSC 3420: Political Theory
PSC 4470: Constitutional Law
PSC 9480: Political Science Internship