Presidents, parties, social movements, and the 2020 election

Megan Ming Francis is an associate professor of political science at the University of Washington and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School. Francis specializes in the study of American politics, with broad interests in criminal punishment, Black political activism, philanthropy, and the post–Civil War South. She is the author of the award winning book Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State. Francis is a proud alumnus of Seattle Public Schools, Rice University in Houston, and Princeton University, where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in politics.

Sidney Tarrow is Maxwell M. Upson Professor Emeritus in the government department at Cornell, where he specializes in social movements, contentious politics, and legal mobilization. Before coming to Cornell he taught at Yale and has been visiting professor at the European University Institute in Florence, the Central European University in Budapest, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. Tarrow's first book was Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (Yale, 1967). His next project was a reconstruction of Italian protest cycle of the late 1960's Democracy and Disorder( Oxford, 1989). With Cambridge University Press, he published (with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly) Dynamics of Contention (2001) and The New Transnational Activism (2006). His latest book with Cambridge is Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 3rd. edition, 2011.

Sidney M. Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Governance and Foreign Affairs, Cavaliers' Distinguished Teaching Professor, and professor of politics. His research focuses on the American presidency, political parties and elections, social movements, and American political development. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate students, he regularly gives public lectures on American politics and participates in programs for international scholars and high school teachers that probe the deep historical roots of contemporary developments in the United States.