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Dr. Theodore Vestal

Theodore M. Vestal,  Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Oklahoma State University

Theodore M. Vestal has been a member of the faculty of Oklahoma State University since 1988, serving in the Department of Political Science, where he has been a professor since 1995, and in the School of International Studies. On 1 August 2008, he was granted the title of Professor Emeritus of Political Science. Professor Vestal teaches primarily in the field of constitutional law, with an emphasis on civil liberties and civil rights. His research interests include public law, the Supreme Court, contemporary Ethiopia, and international education. Dr. Vestal testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Africa in 1994 on "Ethiopia: The Challenges Ahead." In 2002, Professor Vestal was awarded a research grant from the Oklahoma Council for the Humanities to write a book about U.S. foreign policy and attitudes towards Africa generally and Ethiopia specifically as seen in the North American travels of Emperor Haile Selassie. 

In September 2002, the Theodore M. Vestal Collection was formally opened in the OSU Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives. From 1994-2007, Dr. Vestal received travel grants from OSU to attend International Ethiopian Studies Conferences in East Lansing, Kyoto, Hamburg, and Trondheim. Stanford University invited Dr. Vestal to be a panelist and moderator and to deliver a paper at the December 2003 conference, "100 Years of US-Ethiopia Relations." In December 2003 he was appointed to the Board of the Ethiopian Research Council, which since 1934 has been disseminating information on the history, culture, civilization, and diplomatic relations of Ethiopia in ancient and modern times. In 2004 he was an official representative of OSU at the 50th anniversary of the founding of Alemaya University in Ethiopia. In 2005 Dr. Vestal served as a moderator at the annual meeting of Orbis Aethiopicus in Liepzig. He delivered a paper on “The Importance of Political Definitions: Semantic Guidelines from Political Science,” at the conference, “Democracy in the 21st Century" at Sebha, Libya, in 2007. In 2011, Dr. Vestal was an evaluator for the MacArthur Foundation's genius grant program.