Todd Breyfogle is Executive Director of Seminars for the Aspen Institute, overseeing the Executive Leadership Seminars (since 1950 the heart of the Aspen Institute’s humanities-based executive leadership development programs), Custom Leadership Programs, the Justice and Society Seminar (founded by Justice Harry Blackmun), and the Office of Curriculum and Moderators.
Todd designs and moderates seminars for the Aspen Institute and has published and lectured widely on political philosophy, social theory, theology, literature, and liberal education. He serves on several non-profit boards, is a recipient of research and curriculum grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arts and Humanities Research Board (UK), and the Templeton Foundation, and is editor emeritus of The American Oxonian, the quarterly publication of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars. He is the editor of Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern (University of Chicago Press) and Philosophy, Politics, and the Conversation of Mankind (Colorado College Press). Before joining the Aspen Institute, Todd was a Fellow and Program Officer at Liberty Fund (where he gained extensive experience organizing and facilitating discussions) and directed and taught in the Honors Program at the University of Denver. He has taught as an adjunct professor at the Iliff School of Theology and as a visiting lecturer in philosophy and religion at the University of Tulsa. He has lectured at universities in the US, UK, Canada, Romania, and India, is past board chair of the American Academy for Liberal Education, and was elected to the Senate of the Phi Beta Kappa Society (2015-2018), where he continues to serve on the Visiting Scholars Committee. In 2015 Todd was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II to the Order of St. John. His most recent book, Creativity, Liberty, Love and the Beauty of the Law (Bloomsbury) appeared in 2017.
A Colorado native, he earned his BA at Colorado College (Phi Beta Kappa) in Classics-History-Politics. He attended Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), where he read Ancient and Modern History and Patristic and Modern Theology. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought (as a Century Fellow and Javitz Fellow).
