Claes G. Ryn is the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of
Statesmanship at the Catholic University of America (C.U.A.), where he has also been Professor of Politics. He was Chair of his department for six years. He has taught also at Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, and Louisiana State University. He was a doctoral and undergraduate student at Uppsala University in his native Sweden. His teaching and research have combined study of ethics, culture, epistemology, and the history of Western political thought with study of American political thought, U.S. foreign policy, and international relations.

His many books include America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire; A Common Human Ground: Universality and Particularity in a Multicultural Age; Democracy and the Ethical Life: A Philosophy of Politics and Community; and the novel A Desperate Man, a moral-political drama. Claes received the C.U.A. Provost’s award for Distinguished Achievement in Research. The C.U.A. Graduate Students Association named him Outstanding Graduate Professor. He is Editor of the scholarly journal Humanitas. Ryn was Chairman and co-founder of the National Humanities Institute, President of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters, and President of the Philadelphia Society. He has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, and Asia, especially China. A frequent visitor to China, he gave the Distinguished Foreign Scholar Lectures at Peking University in 2000. These lectures were published as a book in Chinese translation by Peking University Press in 2001. In 2012 he was named Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal University. Three of his books and many of his articles have been published in China in Chinese translation.

He is an Honorary Member of Sweden’s oldest and largest student association, Heimdal, at Uppsala
University.