Current Leadership
Jamila Michener is an associate professor in the department of Government and the Senior Associate Dean of Public Engagement at the Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. She studies poverty, race, and public policy in the United States. Her research investigates the ways that public policy shapes the material and political lives of economically and racially marginalized Americans, as well as the ways that members of such groups shape American policy and politics. She is author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press). Her current research examines the ways that civil legal institutions affect democratic citizenship in marginalized communities. She is the director of the Cornell Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures.
David A. Bateman is an associate professor in the department of Government and a member of the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. His research focuses on democratic institutions, with a particular attention to how these can both reinforce structures of oppression and disenfranchisement as well as become sites for their transformation and dismantling. He is the author of Disenfranchising Democracy: The Construction of the Electorate in the United States, United Kingdom, and France (Cambridge University Press) and co-author, with Ira Katznelson and John Lapinski, of Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction (Princeton University Press). His current research includes an examination of the diverse forms and objects of political and economic activism undertaken by African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its importance for subsequent labor and civil rights organizing; and a political-historical analysis of the development of the ideas, institutions, and supporting organizations of “industrial democracy” in the United States.