Rogers M. Smith, Vice President University of Pennsylvania

Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and Chair of the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism.  He teaches American constitutional law and American political thought, with special interests in issues of citizenship and racial, gender, and class inequalities. He is the author or co-author of many essays and five books, including Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (2003).  His 1997 book Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History received “best book” awards from the American Political Science Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Social Science History Association, among others, and was a Finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History.  Smith received a B.A. degree from James Madison College, Michigan State University in 1975 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1980.  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and chaired Penn’s Political Science Department from 2003 to 2006.

A member of the APSA since 1980, in recent years Smith has served as an APSA Council Member and member of the Council’s Administrative Committee in 2005-2006; as a member of the Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession from 2004-2007; and as Co-Chair of the APSA Task Force on Graduate Education in 2002-2003. He was President of the Politics and History Section and program chair for the Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence Division in 2001-2002. He has been an active participant in the Perestroika movement and remains committed to an intellectually pluralistic discipline and to developing a fair, representative system of competitive APSA elections.