I felt that this class was quite horrible. The professor purposely ignored the emails of most of his students during the duration of the semester. Whenever he didn’t feel like dealing with an issue, he simply chose to ignore the issue altogether. The grading was a bit harsh on very complex topics. He graded fairly in the beginning half of the semester and chose to randomly start grading harder on the last assignment due for the most amount of points at 50% of the overall grade. Overall, I would never take this class again. Move at your own risk.

Very tough grader with writing assignments and the writing assignments is all you get graded for. Some had a better experience by asking lots of questions during office hours so I would recommend as most of the writings are about your interpretations of a philosopher's/politician's argument. Just wish there was more opportunities to increase your grade or individual writing assignments rather than the majority being parts of the writing for the final. Overall the prof is very enthusiastic and makes going to class fun :)

Dr. Trojan was really sweet and helped clarify really difficult coursework. My TA, Michael M., was also really helpful and provided a lot of assistance.

Honestly, this was a brutal class for me. Im an IR concentration and took this class because I needed to take a theory class as one of the courses outside of my concentration. Out of all the upper div courses ive taken over the past two years this has been my least favorite by far. The prof was very subjective in his gradings, and did not really have any rubrics or guidelines for writing the papers which made up the majority of the grade. The final paper had very vague instructions and when I spoke with him during office hours he did not seem very approachable at all and was not willing to give many suggestions regarding how I could improve my work. That being said, if you know that you love theory and want a professor who is just as big of a fan of it as you are, this is the class for you. If you are someone outside of the concentration looking to take a theory course to get your requirements fulfilled, and only slightly interested in the topic or not very well versed in the writings of political theorists then definitely stay away. If I could go back in time to stop myself from taking this class I definitely would, I do not feel like I learned that much and feel like a lot of the views shared in the class mirrored that of the professor and were not very open to debate or other interpretations. Again, definitely would not recommend this course unless theory is your forte and something your are deeply passionate in.

The workload of this class was really heavy. Tons of readings. Have to write a total of three papers (two short ones and a longer one) throughout the quarter. The grading of this class can be said to be determined by the three papers, which Prof called interpretive arguments. Basically you have to follow the rubric he designed when writing, and make sure you stick with interpreting the meaning of the text instead of talking about your thoughts on it. An A for this class is not impossible, but it would likely cost you a lot of energy.

One of the best lower div poli sci classes I have taken. Although professor Trojan is certainly a character, he is beyond engaging and fun during lectures. So much so that I was devastated to miss out on classes when the strikes happened. The grade in the class consists mainly of papers which are manageable as long as you do the reading or even if you simply understand it thematically. Although the readings seem tedious, they are made to be interesting in lecture and can often be skimmed over. Definitely take this class with Dr.Trojan!

Personally, I was not a fan of this class. Part of it was the material, which is basically just your run-of-the-mill political philosophy texts (Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and a couple of contemporary articles near the end). You can tell Dr. Trojan is passionate about the material, but a lot of the time he came across as kind of arrogant in his lectures and didn't really offer interpretations of the philosophers' overarching theory.

The assignments of this class included Perusall annotations that counted for participation credit, Reading Engagements (worksheets that are equivalent to about 3 paragraphs of interpretation and analysis), Interventions (basically slightly longer versions of the reading engagements that aren't in worksheet format), and the Final Essay. For the final essay, Trojan gave us about 5 prompts we could choose from. These were very, very standard interpretive assignments. If you like a boring assignment that you can pump out pretty easily, the work in this class will be right up your alley. Personally, I think the only interesting thing about Political Theory is how you can apply it externally, like to modern events or media, so, I was kind of let down by the unimaginative assignments. Kinda felt like a high school philosophy class.