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.