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Contributing to the convivial milieu of Skidmore‟s Government department are two up and coming academics by the names of Natalie and Flagg Taylor. Young, married, and hip to the scene, students of everything from American politics to political philosophy have grown to love the dy-namic duo, with hopes of seeing them on Skidmore‟s campus for a long time to come.

Born in Lake Forest, Illinois, about 30 minutes north of Chicago, Frank Flagg Taylor IV got off to a rough start in his academic career. He came to Kenyon College with hopes of becoming a doctor and completing a pre-med track. Eventually, deterred by a biology professor disap-pointed in his department, Flagg decided to pursue political science and English. Beginning in the spring of his sopho-more year, he took a series of political theory courses, in-cluding seminars on Locke and Rousseau. “It wasn‟t any one thinker that inspired me,” recounts Flagg, “It just hadn‟t oc-curred to me that someone would write a book that years later would shape the way people thought about this or that.”

After college, Flagg worked at a think tank in San Francisco studying public policy. It was, however, his ex-perience in graduate school that would change his life. Little did Flagg know, but the blonde girl from his Rousseau semi-nar, Natalie Fuehrer, would soon become his lovely wife.

Natalie Taylor, a Westerville, Ohio native, became interested in politics in high school. It was Kenyon‟s intro-duction to politics class, “Quest for Justice,” however, that sealed the deal for Natalie. “It made me appreciate,” said Natalie, “how political life is informed by the fundamental and elusive questions that confront human beings: what is human nature? What kind of political regime promotes hu-man flourishing?”

Natalie worked in a congressional office in the sum-mers during college and after college for three years, but she

preferred “the contemplative life” and left politics to attend graduate school. It was during their graduate years at Ford-ham University that the Taylors met, fell in love, and be-came the most enviable couple in academia.

Today, the Taylors teach political science at Skidmore; their offices happily situated adjacent to one another in their own wing of the Government department. They are also hard at work, enlightening the academic world with a series of projects. Natalie has been writing about t the political questions presented in the hit TV show Mad Men for about a year but admits that she doesn‟t know if it will ever find print. She is working primarily on a con-tribution to a series of essays on Mary Wollstonecraft. Her piece will explore Wollstonecraft‟s thought and her rela-tionship to the Scottish Enlightenment.

Flagg is also preparing for his first trip abroad to Prague, to the Czech Republic. There, he will interview dissident political thinkers of the communist era, and find out to what extent their writings are still used in contempo-rary education. This trip to Prague will allow Flagg to con-tinue his research on dissident political thought. His collec-tion of edited essays, The Great Lie: Classic and Recent Appraisals of Ideology and Totalitarianism will be pub-lished this summer. The collection of essays is his first big project and was begun in the summer of 2005, when Flagg taught his first course on dissident political thought during Skidmore‟s summer session.

The Taylors now live happily in Wilton, New York. Their daughter, Maggie, will be 2 years old in July, and their son, Frank Flagg Taylor V, will be 6 in May. Natalie and Flagg, with their excellent skills in relating to students and brilliant minds, have become loved and appre-ciated members of the Skidmore community and the aca-demic world at large.

THANK YOU to the following students and alums who have contributed to this edition of the newsletter:

Warren Bianchi, Annie Bruckner, April Clark, Oliver Crook, Nick Hara, Ian Kelly, Rachel Konowitz, Michael Kraines, Emma Kurs, Caitlin Mahoney, Miles Mattison, Devin Mellor, Simone Pérez, Cara Philbin, Tom Qualtere, Rasheed Rankine, Tyler Reny, Isabelle Russo, Will Sharry, Jonathan Sibley, Ritika Singh, Jenny Snow, Ashley Storrow, Laura Swartz,

Daniel Sznajderman, Alison Wrynn and Marisola Xhelili