Faculty Guide

Title

Associate Professor of History

History

Expertise

United States social and political history, with special interests in legal history, urban history, and the Progressive Era (1890-1920).

Profile

Willrich's current research centers on the many ways that ordinary Americans used the law--legal ideas, institutions, and litigation--to challenge the expanding scale and scope of government social intervention during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is writing a book about the great wave of smallpox epidemics that struck America and its overseas territories around the turn of the twentieth century, spurring the growth of modern public health authority, and engendering widespread social and legal opposition to the government policy of compulsory vaccination.
Willrich teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on American Legal History, crime and punishment, social politics, the Progressive Era, and the literature of American history.
In 2007-08, he is chair of the Graduate Program in American History.

Awards and Honors

Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lectureship Program, 2007-2010. (2007)

Named a Top Young Historian by George Mason Universitys History News Network (2005)

Norman Award for Faculty Research and Creative Projects, Brandeis University (2005)

Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (2004)

Residential Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2004 - 2005)

William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Prize, American Society for Legal History (2004)

Bernstein Faculty Fellowship, Brandeis University (2003)

John H. Dunning Prize, American Historical Association (2003)

Mazer Award for research support, Brandeis University (2001 - 2002)

Biennial Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, for "the best published article treating any aspect of U.S. history in the period 1865-1917." (2000 - 2001)

American Bar Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, Chicago (declined). (1999 - 2000)

Erwin C. Surrency Prize, for best article on law or constitutionalism, American Society for Legal History (1999 - 2000)

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Newberry Library, Chicago (1999 - 2000)

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (1999)

Courses Taught

FYS	32b	Crime and Punishment in History
HIST	160a	American Legal History I
HIST	160b	American Legal History II
HIST	168b	America in the Progressive Era: 1890-1920
HIST	200b	Colloquium in American History
HIST	205a	Social Politics in the Progressive Era

Scholarship

Willrich, Michael. "'The Least Vaccinated of Any Civilized Country': Personal Liberty and Public Health in the Progressive Era." Journal of Policy History 20. 1 (WINTER 2008) (2008).

Willrich, Michael. "Chapter 6: Criminal Justice in the United States." The Cambridge History of American Law. vol. 3 Ed. Christopher L. Tomlins and Michael Grossberg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 195-231.

Willrich, Michael. "Review." Rev. of The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government, by Markus Dirk Dubber. American Historical Review vol. 111 April 2006: 466-467.

Willrich, Michael. "Review." Rev. of First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920, by Jeffrey S. Adler. Journal of American History vol. 93 December 2006: 884-885.

Willrich, Michael. "Review." Rev. of Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution; and The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Democracy in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon, by Alan Dawley and Robert D. Johnston. Social History vol. 30 May 2005: 265-268.

Willrich, Michael. "Urbanism is History: A Review Essay." Connecticut History 44. Spring 2005 (2005): 154-157.

Willrich, Michael. "Book Review of 'Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920'." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2004).

Willrich, Michael. "Book Review of Recasting American Liberty: Gedner, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2004).

Willrich, Michael. "'Close That Place of Hell': Poor Women and the Cultural Politics of Prohibition." Journal of Urban History 29. (2003).

Willrich, Michael. "Book Review of "Reform and Resistance: Gender, Delinquency, and Americas First Juvenile Court"." Journal of American History 89. (2003).

Willrich, Michael. "Book Review of The Juvenile Court and the Progressives." The Historian (2003).

Willrich, Michael. "Boyz to Men . . . And Back Again?: Revisiting a Forgotten Experiment in Juvenile Justice." Judicature 86. (2003): 258-262.

Willrich, Michael. "Dickering for Justice: Power, Interests, and the Plea Bargaining Juggernaut." Reviews in American History 31. (2003).

Willrich, Michael. "The Case for Courts: Law and Political Development in the Progressive Era." The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History., 2003

Willrich, Michael. City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Willrich, Michael. "Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America." Journal of American History 87. (2000): 460-489.

Willrich, Michael. "The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900-1930." Law and History Review 16. (1998): 63-111.