Michael Meranze

Biography

Michael Meranze joined the department as Professor of History in 2006. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and has taught in the history department at the University of California, San Diego since 1989. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary and a fellow of the Institute of Early American History and Culture from 1987-1989. Meranze has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies among others.

Meranze specializes in United States intellectual and legal history with an emphasis on early America. He published Laboratories of Virtue , an examination of the birth of the penitentiary in the context of the contradictions of the American Revolution and early Liberalism, edited a volume of Benjamin Rush’s essays, and has written on the history of the body, the death penalty, conscience, and the relationship between the European Enlightenment and the present. His is completing an essay on the criminal law and the colonial project for a forthcoming Cambridge History of Law in America and is currently working on two long-term projects: one, an analysis of sensibility and violence in the Revolutionary Atlantic and the other an attempt to rethink the history and meaning of the American death penalty from the eighteenth-century to the present.

Currently working on two long-term projects: one, an analysis of sensibility and violence in the Revolutionary Atlantic and the other an attempt to rethink the history and meaning of the American death penalty from the eighteenth-century to the present.