University Leadership

Elizabeth L’Arrivee studies education as the meeting point between politics and philosophy, focusing on political habituation, philosophic conversion, and freedom of thought across different constitutional orders. Her work on Plato has appeared in History of Political Thought and The European Legacy, where she examines Plato’s account of the best practical regime, the Socratic method, and their implications for political life. Her book manuscript, A Precedent for Freedom: The Philosophic Way of Life and Plato’s Republic, examines the experience of philosophic conversion and its goal, freedom of thought.

She is currently a Fellow in the Forum for Civics and Liberal Education at the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at the University of Toledo, where she is developing a book-length project on civic education and freedom of thought under American constitutional government. From 2016 to 2020, she was a Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute. In that role, she organized two national undergraduate conferences and led sustained reading groups on Plato, Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Thomas More. 

She has taught political theory, American government and political thought, the great books, and philosophy of education at Clemson University (including the Institute for the Study of Capitalism’s Lyceum Program), Colgate University’s Liberal Arts Core Curriculum, and Ashland University’s Master of Arts in American History and Government program. Her teaching centers on primary texts, rhetorical analysis, and disciplined inquiry aimed at cultivating judgment and intellectual independence.

At Rosary College, Dr. L’Arrivee serves as Director of Academic Policy and Compliance and as a faculty member, leading academic policy, curriculum development, accreditation, assessment, and faculty development, and teaching courses on philosophy, rhetoric, and writing. She also serves as Communications Director for the Tocqueville Center for the Study of Democracy and Society at Furman University, contributing to its lecture series and conferences and developing public programming on constitutional self-government and liberal and civic virtue, including the Tocqueville Talks podcast.

She earned her PhD in political science from the University of Notre Dame and lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with her husband, Rob L’Arrivee, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Furman University, and their three children, whom they homeschool.