Rogers M. Smith

Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He centers his research on constitutional law, American political thought, and modern legal and political theory, with special interests in questions of citizenship, race, ethnicity and gender. He is the author or co-author of 9 books and numerous articles. His 1997 book, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Citizenship in U.S. History, won six book prizes and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

He received 5 teaching prizes from Yale University, where he taught from 1980 to 2001, and Penn, where he taught from 2001 to 2022. He is a recipient of the Frank J. Goodnow Award of the American Political Science Association and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the APSA’s American Political Thought Section, among other recognitions. He was elected as an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow in 2004, a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2011, and a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016. Professor Smith served as Penn’s Associate Dean of Social Sciences from 2014 to 2018 and as President of the American Political Science Association in 2018-2019. He was the founding director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy and the co-founder of the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia. 

Research interests:
Public Law
American Political Thought
Political Theory