Alexandra Minna Stern
Professor and Chair of American Culture, Professor in History, Women's Studies, and Obstetrics and Gynecology
I am a Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, and hold appointments in the Departments of History, Women's Studies, and Obstetrics and Gynecology. My research has focused on the history of eugenics, genetics, society, and justice in the United States and Latin America. I also have written about the history of public health, infectious diseases, and tropical medicine. Through these topics, I have explored the dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, social difference, and reproductive politics.
Angela D. Dillard
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education
Angela D. Dillard is Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College ofLiterature, Science and the Arts (LSA) at the University of Michigan. She is also the Earl Lewis Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and in the ResidentialCollege. Dean Dillard specializes in American and African-American intellectual history,particularly around issues of race, religion, ideology, and politics — on both the Left and the Right sides of the political spectrum. The author of Guess Who’s Coming to DinnerNow?: Multicultural Conservatism in America (2001) and Faith in the City: PreachingRadical Social Change in Detroit (2007), she is currently at work on a book entitled Civil Rights Conservatism on the relationship between the postwar civil rights movement and the rise of the New Right.
Anne Berg
Lecturer; Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in History
Anne Berg was trained in modern German and European history. Growing out of her dissertation work, her book project, Urban Legend: Truth, Travesty and Film in Nazi Hamburg illustrates how debates over film and public leisure were essential in the making and breaking of the Nazi city. In a second project, Anne examines the politics of waste and recycling in the Third Reich and Nazi occupied Europe. Anne’s wider research and teaching interests include urban history, film studies, the history of the welfare state, and history of food, waste, and war.
Christian Davenport
Professor of Political Science
Christian Davenport is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan as well as a Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies. Primary research interests include political conflict (e.g., human rights violations, genocide/politicide, torture, political surveillance, civil war and social movements), measurement, racism and popular culture. He is the author of four books; two solo-authored: State Repression and the Promise of Democratic Peace (2007, Cambridge University Press), and Media Bias, Perspective and State Repression: The Black Panther Party (2010, Cambridge University Press) – winner of Best Book in Racial Politics and Social Movements by the American Political Science Association; and, two edited: Repression and Mobilization with Carol Mueller and Hank Johnston (University of Minnesota Press. 2004), and Paths to State Repression: Human Rights Violations and Contentious Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
Farina Mir
Associate Professor of History
Farina Mir is Associate Professor of History and Director, Center for South Asian Studies. She is a historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, with a particular interest in the social, cultural, and religious history of late-colonial north India. Her interest in communalism—antagonism along religious lines—in modern India led to her first book, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) — which was awarded the John F. Richards Prize by the American Historical Association and the Bernard Cohn Prize by the Association of Asian Studies. Mir's interest in Islam in the Indian subcontinent informs her current projects: a book on Muslim ethics and modernity in late-colonial India and a synthetic history of Islam in South Asia.
Department Profile
Fiona Lee
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion/Professional Development at LSA
Fiona Lee is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Psychology, and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion/Professional Development at LSA. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard University in Cambridge, MA in 1995. She received her BA in Economics and Psychology from Scripps College in Claremont, CA in 1987. In 1995, she joined the faculty at University of Michigan with the joint appointment in the Department of Psychology in LSA and the Department of Management and Organizations in the Ross School of Business. Dr. Lee’s research examines how people’s psychological management of their identities—such as culture, gender, social class—relates to important social behaviors in organizations, such as creativity, leadership, advocacy, negotiation, teamwork, experimentation, and communication. At the University of Michigan, she has taught a variety of courses for undergraduate and graduate students, including Introduction to Organizational Psychology, Human Behavior in Organizations, Research Methods, and Teaching Academy.
Heather Ann Thompson
Professor of History; Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies
Heather Ann Thompson, Ph.D., is Professor of History at in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies, the Residential College, and the Department of History at the University of Michigan. Thompson writes about the history as well as current crises of mass incarceration for numerous popular and scholarly publications. Her work can be found in the New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, and The Huffington Post, and she has appeared as well on NPR, Sirius Radio, on various television news programs, and in a number of documentaries. Several of Thompson’s scholarly pieces, including “Why Mass Incarceration Matters,” have won best article awards, and her popular piece in The Atlantic, “How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America,” was named a finalist for the Best Media Award given by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
John Carson
Associate Professor of History; Director of Undergraduate Studies
Fields of Study
U.S. intellectual/cultural history, history of science, history of the human sciences, 19th-century U.S. history, European intellectual history
Nicholas Valentino
Professor of Political Science
Professor Valentino is a student of political communication, political psychology, and electoral behavior. His work focuses on political campaigns, racial attitudes, emotions, and social group cues in news and political advertising. His current work examines the intersection between racial attitudes and emotion in predicting political participation and vote choice.
Robert Mickey
Associate Professor of Political Science
Professor Mickey's research focuses on U.S. politics in historical perspective. He is interested in American political development, political parties, racial politics, and policy responses to inequality. His forthcoming book explores the post-war U.S. South as a set of transitions from authoritarian rule. Current projects concern racial politics in the urban North and West; racial appeals and the politics of symbols; race and national party alignment; and the politics of national health insurance.
Molly Brookfield
Graduate Editorial Assistant
Molly Brookfield is a PhD candidate in the departments of History and Women's Studies. She is working on a dissertation that traces women's experiences of harassment in public places—or "street harassment"—in the 19th- and 20th-century United States. Before coming to Michigan she received an MA in Cultural Heritage Studies from University College London and worked for several years in museums, archives, and historic sites. She continues to use her public history training to think about how to make her research relevant to present-day concerns and accessible to a non-academic audience.