Melissa Dow

• Position: Visiting Assistant Instructor
• Department: Reubin O'D. Askew Department of Government
• Office Location: Building 77, Room 121G
• mdow@uwf.edu
• Campus: 850.474.2807

Biography

Dr. Melissa Dow teaches American Politics and upper-level courses in Government. Before coming to UWF, she taught Politics, Humanities, Philosophy and English courses at the University of Dallas and Dallas College.

Her research is largely focused on the intersection of politics, rhetoric, and literature, particularly the ways in which literature shapes citizens and civic life. She has written on the moderate vision of politics presented in Dante's Divine Comedy, including the way in which Dante, augmenting and correcting Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, develops in his readers an understanding of how to correctly value eternal and temporal goods without totalizing either one.

She has a broad interest in classical and medieval political philosophy and has presented on topics such as the classical virtue of Magnanimity in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and the Book of Job, the centrality of Brutus to the parade of noble Romans in Aeneid 6, and Rousseau's appropriation of classical rhetoric in Emile.

Degrees & Institutions

Dow received her BA in Classical Liberal Arts and Culture (Cum Laude) from New Saint Andrews College in 2010, her MA in Politics from the University of Dallas in 2018, and her Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Dallas in 2024.