Title

Professor of History

History
Legal Studies
Politics

Expertise

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

Profile

Michael Willrich has been teaching at Brandeis since 1999. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on American political and legal history (from the colonial period to the present), crime and punishment, social politics, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the literature of American history.
Professor 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.
Willrich's new book, POX: AN AMERICAN HISTORY was published by the Penguin Press in April 2011. The book tells the story of 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.