Michael Brown - Featured Faculty 2020
Michael Brown
College of Liberal Arts
Michael Brown’s scholarship focuses on the relationships between intellectuals and publics in American political culture. While Americans have looked upon intellectuals with hope, as sources of crucial knowledge and wisdom, they have also met them with scorn, as an “out-of-touch” and potentially anti-democratic elite. Michael’s book, Hope and Scorn: Eggheads, Experts, and Elites in American Politics (University of Chicago Press, October 2020) examines this fraught role of intellectuals in American democracy since World War Two.
The book shows how debates over intellectuals’ political role have been a means of working out aspirations for and anxieties about American democracy—from the time of the 1950s “egghead” to the prominence, more recently, of the public intellectual.
Michael’s book was supported by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the New York Public Library, the Wisconsin State Historical Society, and the RIT College of Liberal Arts Publication Cost Grant Program, among other sources.
Though Hope and Scorn was a project years in the making, it fittingly comes out now, in the midst of a pandemic, when prominent public-health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci have faced the polarized responses indicated in the book’s title. As both a historian of public intellectuals and a public historian, Michael is broadly interested in how people use ideas—especially ideas about the past—to inform their sense of the present.
At RIT, Michael teaches American history and public history. As a faculty affiliate of the Museum Studies Program, he supports students working toward careers in the field of public history. Michael has degrees in government and philosophy from Cornell University and the London School of Economics, respectively, and his PhD in history from the University of Rochester.
Michael Brown
Assistant Professor
College of Liberal Arts