Todd Breyfogle

Todd Breyfogle is Executive Director of the Executive Leadership Seminars for the Aspen Institute, overseeing a number of seminar offerings, including the Aspen Executive Seminar on leadership, values and the good society—since 1950 the heart of the Aspen Institute’s humanities-based executive leadership development programs.

Todd moderates seminars for the Aspen Institute and has published and lectured widely on the great books, political philosophy, 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, 1999), co-editor of Philosophy, Politics, and the Conversation of Mankind (Colorado College, 2016), and author of On Creativity, Liberty, Love and the Beauty of the Law (Bloomsbury, 2017). Before joining the Aspen Institute, Todd was a Fellow and Program Officer at Liberty Fund (where he gained extensive experience organizing and facilitating great books discussions) and taught in and directed 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, including Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Dartmouth, Concordia, Wesleyan, and the University of Chicago. He currently chairs the board of the American Academy for Liberal Education, serves on the board of the Alliance for Liberal Learning, and in 2012 was elected to the Senate of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 2015 Todd was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II to the Order of St. John, an 11th century Order of Chivalry of the British Crown.

A Colorado native, he earned his B.A. 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.