About Our Affilated Faculty.
Ed Remus
Edward Remus is an Assistant Professor and Social Sciences Librarian at Northeastern Illinois University. He began his career organizing viewpoint-diverse discussions and debates while working for the Chicago Public Library from 2013 to 2015. Since joining the NEIU Libraries in 2015, he has organized nearly a dozen scholarly, viewpoint-diverse panel discussions of topics ranging from abortion law and the Second Amendment to political realignment and the political status of Puerto Rico. He brings over a decade of experience designing and conducting information literacy instruction sessions across a range of subject areas (including media literacy sessions), and nine years of this experience has been at the university level. In 2022 he won and administered a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association to fund a series of viewpoint-diverse panel discussions on topics related to the United States Constitution. Edward also designed and taught a history course that surveys the scholarly and public responses to the 2019 New York Times-published 1619 Project. Edward is currently collaborating with the NEIU History Department to develop an MA certificate in viewpoint diversity.
Simon Cullen
Simon’s research uses tools from cognitive science and philosophy to improve how we reason and communicate. One project develops new empirical methods to advance experimental philosophy and other areas of psychology. Another develops and tests classroom interventions that improve student motivation and achievement by giving students greater autonomy. And a third project aims to improve reasoning, open-mindedness, and across-the-aisle communication via experiments in computer-aided pedagogy, argument visualization, market-based discussion moderation, and AI mediation for improving the quality of dialogue.
In AY 2024–25, he is the Dietrich College AI and Education Fellow, allowing him to focus on developing and experimentally testing AI applications to enhance group reasoning, depolarize political dialogue, and foster understanding on campus and beyond. After completing his PhD in Philosophy at Princeton University, he was a postdoc in the Philosophy Department at Princeton and in the Cohen Lab at Princeton Neuroscience Institute. In 2018, he joined the philosophy faculty at Carnegie Mellon University.
Yehudah Potok
Rabbi Yehudah Potok, Director of the Jewish Education Program at Facing History and Ourselves, brings over two decades of leadership in formal and experiential educational settings. He has written and lectured on various topics regarding organizational change, school culture, educational technology, contemporary antisemitism, and Holocaust education. In his current role, Rabbi Potok supports educators in empowering students to engage with complex societal questions and develop moral courage through pedagogic strategies that connect historical issues with ethical decision-making, identity formation, and civic responsibility.
Anthony Laden
Anthony Laden is a Professor of Philosophy. He is the Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Education, a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1996. He works in moral and political philosophy, where his research focuses on reasoning, democratic theory, feminism, the politics of identity, and the philosophy of education. He also has interests in the history of moral and political philosophy, especially Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. He is the author of Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity (Cornell, 2001), as well as the co-editor, with David Owen, of Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge, 2007). He has published numerous essays on the work of John Rawls, including “The House that Jack Built” (Ethics, 2003), and most recently, “Constructivism as Rhetoric” (Blackwell’s Companion to Rawls, 2014).
Joshua Salzmann
Joshua Salzmann earned his Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently a professor at Northeastern Illinois University where he teaches classes on the history of crime and violence, cities, culture, and politics in the United States. Salzmann is the author of Liquid Capital: Making the Chicago Waterfront (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018), which won a “Superior Achievement Award,” from the Illinois State Historical Society in 2018 and earned an honorable mention in the Midwest History Association’s 2019 Jon Gjerde Prize competition for the best book on the region’s history. His essays have appeared in LABOR, Enterprise and Society, The Journal of Illinois History, Crain’s Chicago Business, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune. In 2021, Salzmann launched the website “Unlocking Chicago’s History: A Guide to Chicago City Government Documents,” which won a prize for “Best Website” from the Illinois State Historical Society. He is currently working on a book entitled Disarming Chicago: Gun Control from Black Power to Barack Obama. Salzmann’s research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Scot Wilson
Scot is the Vice President of Academics at Close Up and began at the foundation in 2006. His main interests are political polarization, economic issues, and the relationship between culture and politics. He was born in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and lived in Italy and Spain before attending college at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. He received a B.A. in history and an M.A. in curriculum and instruction. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies at Indiana University where he is studying democratic and civic education and political philosophy. In addition to his work at Close Up, Scot is on the leadership group of the Teaching for Democracy Alliance, a coalition of civic education organizations working to promote teaching about elections and voting.