Michael Meranze is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia 1760-1835 (North Carolina, 1996), co-editor (with David Garland and Randall McGowen) of America’s Death Penalty: Between Past and Present (NYU, 2011) and numerous essays on legal and intellectual history. He also co-edits the blog Remaking the University.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
We Other Humanists: On Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s “Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age”
“Crisis” is both the driving force and the false consciousness of the humanities....
Remaking the University: Geoffrey Galt Harpham on Democracy and Interpretation in the United States
What do Frederick Douglass and the New Criticism have in common?...
Remaking the University: The Idea of the English University
Michael Meranze reviews Stefan Collini’s “Speaking of Universities.”...
Taking Care
Barbara Taylor's "The Last Asylum" is a gripping account of her own madness and a historical reflection on asylums and the implication of their demise....
Pathology of the Carceral State
Crime and Punishment: Is it too late to control the carceral state? Michael Meranze on Marie Gottschalk’s "commanding and disturbing" new book....
We Wish We Weren’t in Kansas Anymore: An Elegy for Academic Freedom
ONE OF THE GREAT CLAIMS of American higher education is that it protects and encourages something called “academic freedom,” a guarantee ...
