Julie Cooper is writing a dissertation in the Department of Rhetoric entitled Modesty and Mystery, or the Tension between Self- Assertion and Self-Effacement in Modern Political Theory. Cooper’s study seeks to recuperate modesty and reticence as dispositions pertinent to contemporary political life and thought. It complicates the canonical account of the stature of the political subject--conventionally associated by liberalism with the “din of incessant debate and deliberation”--through a close reading of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Nietzsche. Cooper argues that, though often conflated with meekness and docility, modesty does not preclude, but rather generates, certain forms of political creativity; that reticence may foster new forms of insight and audacity.