Michael Willrich

Michael Willrich is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and the Leff Families Professor of History at Brandeis University, where he has received two university-wide teaching prizes. He is the author of American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the U.S. Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (coming in October 2023 from Basic Books), and two other award-winning books, Pox: An American History (Penguin Press, 2011) and City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (Cambridge, 2003). His writing has been published in the New York Times, the New Republic, Mother Jones, and Washington City Paper, where he got his start as a young writer covering urban politics. Built upon deep archival research, Willrich’s books tell sweeping stories about how remarkable individuals and local communities—from long-forgotten Appalachian mining camps to great cities like New York and Chicago—have contended with transformative global historical processes: industrialization, war, epidemics, and the rise of the modern state. He lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts.