Daniel Mark is an assistant professor of Political Science at Villanova University. He teaches political theory, philosophy of law, American government, and politics and religion. There he is a faculty associate of the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good, and he holds the rank of battalion professor in Villanova’s Navy Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He is on the Steering Committee for the Villanova Political Theology Project, and on the Graduate Committee of the Political Science Department. He has served as faculty adviser to the mock trial team, and mentor in Villanova’s Faith and Learning Scholars Program.
In 2017-18, Mark was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. In 2015-16, he was a Visiting Fellow, Department of Politics at Princeton University under the sponsorship of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
Mark is Vice Chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. He was appointed in 2014 by Speaker John Boehner, and he was reappointed in 2016 by Speaker Paul Ryan. He has participated in USCIRF delegations to Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Vietnam, and published on international religious freedom in US News & World Report, Investor’s Business Daily, Foreign Affairs, The Hill, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
He holds a BA, MA, and PhD from Princeton University. He wrote his dissertation under the direction of Professor Robert P. George on “Authority and Legal Obligation.” There, he participated in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Penn-Princeton Bioethics Forum. He was also affiliated with the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and served as coordinator of its Undergraduate Fellows Forum.
Mark is a Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, works with the Tikvah Fund in New York, and he has taught at the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. Additionally, he is a member of the board of directors of the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, a member of the advisory council of VanaCox, and a member of the board of advisors of the Blackstone and Burke Center for Law and Liberty at Faulkner University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law.
Mark has spoken at meetings of the Acton Institute, the US Military Academy/West Point, the American Enterprise Institute, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Love & Fidelity Network, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the James Wilson Institute, Opus Dei, and Chabad. In 2015, Mark spoke at the World Meeting of Families, organized by the Catholic Church. It drew 20,000 participants to Philadelphia. Recent appearances include speeches at Ave Maria University, Baylor University, Brigham Young University, Colorado Christian University, the University of Notre Dame, and the Mount Academy, the Bruderhof (Anabaptist) high school in upstate New York. Before graduate school, Mark spent four years as a high school teacher in New York City, and he received the New Jersey Department of Education Commissioner’s Distinguished Teacher Candidate Award while earning his teaching certification.
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