David C. Hoffman (Ph.D., University of Iowa, 2000) is a Professor in Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, where he serves as Faculty Director of the Masters of Public Administration program. He has produced wide-ranging scholarship reflective of his interests in history, rhetoric, politics, and deliberative democracy, publishing in Rhetorica, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Parabola and other journals. He has served as president of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. Thomas Paine has been an important focus of his work, which has included articles like “‘The Creation We Behold’: Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Physico-Theology,” published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, and book chapters including “Thomas Paine’s Le Siècle de La Raison, Ou Le Sens Commun Des Droits De L’Homme: Notes on the Earliest Edition of The Age of Reason,” published in New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies. Professor Hoffman’s book, American Freethought: The History of a Social Movement 1794-1948 (Johns Hopkins, 2025) grounds the story of a social movement that fought for greater separation of church and state in the influence of Paine’s deistic manifesto, The Age of Reason. Professor Hoffman’s interest in deliberative democracy has led him to collaborate with the Tenement Museum in New York City and the Smithsonian Museum of National History in Washington D.C. to produce guides coordinated with ongoing exhibitions. These guides invite readers to engage deliberatively with historical decisions connected to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, US refugee policy in the 1950s, and the 1988 Civil Liberties Act. Professor Hoffman’s current in-progress book project, Deliberation and Decision Making, applies insights from the academic field of deliberative democracy to the practicalities of organizational decision-making. He is also working on a book length publication history of The Age of Reason.
