Michelle Rose, PhD
U.S. Politics Program Coordinator
- Email: mrose2@csuchico.edu
- Phone: 530-898-5335
- Location: BSS 314A
Dr. Michelle Rose is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice. She presently serves as the Program Coordinator for the U.S. Politics Major and Political Science Minor, as well as the Faculty Advisor for Chico State’s competitive Model UN team. Dr. Rose received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University and M.Phil. in International Relations from the University of Cambridge.
Dr. Rose is a political theorist with a particular interest in democratic sensibilities, aesthetics, Black political thought, gender and sexuality studies, and the Harlem Renaissance. Her current book project, The Art of Democratic Living: Recovering Alain Locke’s Politics of Aesthetics, explores the aesthetic strategies of Alain Locke, a figurehead of the New Negro movement and Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. She argues that Locke’s insistence on expressive autonomy for Black artists is not merely a defense of “art for art’s sake.” Instead, he is urging us towards a more robust conception of democratic citizenship and collective democratic life which is predicated on the intelligent deployment of aesthetic sensibilities.
Most recently, Dr. Rose received the “Best Paper Award 2024” for her paper, “The ‘Great Debate’ of the Harlem Renaissance: A Democratic Ethics of Encounter,” from the American Political Thought section of the American Political Science Association. Her work can be found in Political Theory and Contemporary Political Theory.
Before arriving at Chico State in 2022, Dr. Rose was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Providence College, a Visiting Lecturer at Wellesley College, and the Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Brown University. She is also a former Graduate Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) at Brown University.
Selected publications:
Rose, M. K. (2023). “His Is a Reverent Vandalism”: Alain Locke’s Aesthetics and Fugitive Democracy. Political Theory, 51(4), 703-735.
Rose, M. K. (2022). Worldmaking after empire: The rise and fall of self-determination: Adom Getachew Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2019, xii+ 276 pp., ISBN: 978-0-691-179155.