Richard A Meisler Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and in the Residential College
About
Professor Angela D. Dillard is the Richard A. Meisler Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican & African Studies, History, and in the Residential College where she is part of the Social Theory & Practice program. She specializes in American and African-American intellectual history, particularly around issues of race, religion and politics — on both the Left and the Right sides of the political spectrum, and maintains an active interest in urban studies. Her first book, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now?: Multicultural Conservatism in America (NYU Press, 2001) was among the first critical studies of conservative political thought among African Americans, Latinos, women and homosexuals. Her second book, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (U of Michigan Press, 2007), focuses on the interconnections of religion and political radicalism in Detroit from the 1930s to the 1960s. Both books reflect Professor Dillard’s interests in the study of political ideologies — how they emerge, how they get deployed in the context of political movements, and how they change over the course of time. Her current manuscript-in-process, tentatively titled A Different Shade of Freedom, is an attempt to write an ideologically wide history situated at the intersection of the post-World War II civil rights movement and the rise of the New Right. Pieces of this work have been presented under the banner of "civil rights conservatism."
Recent publications include:
“Black Power/Black Faith: Re-Thinking the `De-Christianization’ of the Black Power Movement,” in Doug Rossinow, Molly Beck and Leilah Danielson, eds. The Religious Left in Modern America: Doorkeepers of a Radical Faith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
“Conservatism,” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Third Edition, Glenn Hendler and Bruce Burgett, eds. (NYU Press, 2020)
She is a faculty advisor of the Detroit School of Urban Studies (https://detroit-school.riw.rackham.umich.edu/) and Co-PI on theEgalitarian Metropolis project, jointly sponsored by LSA and the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. In addition Dillard serves on the Executive Committees for the Bentley Historical Library and the U-M Institute for the Humanities as well as on the Advisory Board for the Mellon Foundation's College & Beyond, II study.
Dillard maintains an interdisciplinary approach to teaching, including courses in African-American intellectual and religious history, on conservative thought, urban studies, the history of Detroit, and the use of science fiction as a form of social analysis. During the 2020-2021 academic year Professor Dillard will be offering courses on "Race and Democracy" in DAAS, "Black Intellectual History" in the Department of History, and on the idea of an egalitarian metropolis for the Residential College. She will also be offering a mini-course on "Democracy & Debate Across LSA" in conjunction with the Fall 2020 Democracy & Debate theme semester for which she serves as chair of the academic advisory committee: https://speakactvote.umich.edu/
From 2015 to 2019 she served as LSA's associate dean from undergraduate education, working extensively on DEI issues, inclusive pedagogy and efforts to diversify STEM as well as the support of transfer students. While that work was rewarding, she looks forward to returning to the faculty and the classroom full time.
