C. Fred Alford

Charles Frederick Alford is an American political scientist and scholar known for his work in moral psychology, psychoanalysis, and social theory. He is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught classical political theory for thirty-eight years.

Alford has authored fifteen books, primarily with academic presses such as Yale University Press, Cornell University Press, and Cambridge University Press.

Early life and education Alford earned his Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979 and his B.A. from Austin College in 1969.

Career Alford joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1979 and was later named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. In 2009, he received the university's Chancellor Kirwan Undergraduate Teacher of the Year Award. He has also received teaching excellence awards from the American Political Science Association and Pi Sigma Alpha. He was also President of the American Political Science Association's Psychology and Politics section. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous academic journals, including Political Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. He continues to publish and currently serves as a contributing editor for The Montreal Review. He has continued applying object relations theory to adult political life throughout his career.

In his 2013 book Trauma and Forgiveness: Consequences and Communities, Alford challenges conventional theories of trauma by analyzing testimonies from Holocaust survivors and victims of everyday trauma. He argues that the traumatized are capable of coherently representing their experiences, and posits that forgiveness is frequently used as a psychological defense to avoid the difficult process of mourning unrecoverable losses. In his book What Evil Means to Us, he argues that the primary experience of evil is existential, an experience of dread and meaningless victimhood rather than a strictly moral one.

While not a professional theologian, he has written extensively on natural law and religion, curating two blogs, traumatheory.com and godblog.org. The latter formed the basis for his book God Now: Christianity and Heresy, published by Wipf and Stock.

Whistleblowing research In his 2001 book Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, Alford departs from heroic narratives of whistleblowers and presents a highly critical view of organizational power and the devastating reprisals faced by individuals. He conceptualizes the ethical framework of whistleblowers through the idea of "narcissism moralised," and details how standing up against organizations frequently results in broken trust and severe trauma.

Awards and honors Alford has received several professional honors throughout his career, including the Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Work in Psychohistory from the Psychohistory Forum. He has been awarded three Fulbright Fellowships, including two Senior Fulbright Research Fellowships to Germany and South Korea.