2115 Francis Scott Key
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
phone: 301-405-4297
fax: 301-314-9399
Email: smichel@umd.edu

Sonya Michel is currently on leave from the department and serving as Director of United States Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. From 2007-2009, she was Director of the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies in the Department of History.

Professor Michel’s research and teaching center on the history of women, men, genders and sexualities and the history of poverty and social welfare, both in the U.S. and in comparative perspective. She is completing two book projects: a monograph, “Old Age Insecurity: Inequality and Instability in U.S. Retirement Provision, 1945 to the Present” (under contract to Princeton University Press for its series "Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America," co-edited by William Chafe, Gary Gerstle, Linda Gordon, and Julian Zelizer); and a textbook, “Poverty and Social Policy in the United States: Historical and Transnational Perspectives,” co-authored with Laura Frader, Sarah Rose, Richard Scotch (under contract to Routledge). Her chapter "Maternalism and Beyond" is forthcoming in the volume Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood and Method in the Twentieth Century, co-edited by Rebecca Jo Plant et al. (Berghahn).

Professor Michel's publications include Civil Society, Public Space and Gender Justice: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, co-edited with Gunilla Budde and Karen Hagemann (Berghahn, in its series "European Civil Society," co-edited by Dieter Gosewinkel and Jürgen Kocka); Children's Interests / Mothers' Rights:The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy (Yale University Press 1999); Engendering America: A Documentary History, with UMD colleague Robyn Muncy (McGraw-Hill 2000); and The Jewish Woman in America (with Charlotte Baum and Paula Hyman, Dial Press, 1975; paperback, NAL/Plume, 1976). She has co-edited Child Care Policy at the Crossroads: Gender and Welfare State Restructuring (with Rianne Mahon, Routledge 2002 ); Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (with Seth Koven, Routledge 1993); and Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (with Margaret Higonnet, Jane Jenson and Margaret Weitz (Yale 1987; paperback, Yale, 1989). She is a founding co-editor of the journal Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society (published by Oxford University Press)

Sonya Michel has taught at Brown, Harvard, Brandeis, Princeton, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was Director of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. She has received several awards, including Fulbright, NEH, Bunting (Radcliffe), Davis Center (Princeton), and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars fellowships. She has served in various capacities for the American Historical Association, the Social Science History Association, and the European Social Science History Conference. In 2008 she co-authored a special report for the AHA on "Internationalizing Student Learning Outcomes in History" ).                     

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