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 director of the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies in the Department of History. Her 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 currently completing two book projects, 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 Civil Society, Public Space and Gender Justice: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, co-edited with Gunilla Budde and Karen Hagemann (under contract with Berghahn Publishers for its series "European Civil Society," co-edited by Dieter Gosewinkel and Jürgen Kocka). 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 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 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. Last year she co-authored a special report for the AHA on "Internationalizing Student Learning Outcomes in History").
           Professor Michel's courses include History 211: Women in America since 1880; History 419: Poverty and Social Policy in the U.S., History 809: Seminar in the History of Women and Gender. History 819: and Gender, Citizenship, and Social Policy. She also teaches American Studies 628: Race, Gender and Empire in U.S. History. In Fall 2006, she will be offering a new version of the General Seminar in Women's and Gender History (History 608E) focusing on feminist theory and gender history and historiography.

Return to Faculty Listing

Current Projects: