Scholarship and Biography
Michael Willrich is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and the Leff Families Professor of History at Brandeis University. He has taught in the Brandeis History Department for the past quarter century, served as Department chair twice, and has received two university prizes for his undergraduate teaching and graduate mentoring. He teaches courses on American political and legal history (from the colonial period to the present), crime and punishment in U.S. history, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the literature of American history. Willrich received his A.B. at Yale University and his PhD at the University of Chicago. His scholarship centers on the social, legal, and political history of the United States since the Civil War. Willrich has written three award-winning books. City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (Cambridge University Press, 2003) traces the rise of radical new ideas about the social causes of crime in modern industrial cities and the new institutions of law and liberal governance that those ideas helped bring into being. Pox: An American History (Penguin Press, 2011) 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. Willrich's most recent book is American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Anarchists and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2023). American Anarchy was named a Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, Willrich’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Mandel Center for the Humanities. A former journalist, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, Washington City Paper, and Mother Jones. He taught at Rice University before coming to Brandeis in 1999. Willrich is the immediate past president of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH).