Experts

Sidney Milkis

White Burkett Miller Professor of Governance and Foreign Affairs

Fast Facts

 

Areas Of Expertise

  • Social Issues
  • Governance
  • Elections
  • Founding and Shaping of the Nation
  • Political Parties and Movements
  • Politics
  • The Presidency

Sidney M. Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Governance and Foreign Affairs and a professor of politics. His research focuses on the American presidency, political parties and elections, social movements, and American political development. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate students, he regularly gives public lectures on American politics and participates in programs for international scholars and high school teachers that probe the deep historical roots of contemporary developments in the United States. 

Milkis earned a BA degree from Muhlenberg College and a PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Sidney Milkis News Feed

"Trump is a legitimate threat — and so far there has indeed been tepid outcry — nothing like the strong resistance that arose in 2017."
Sidney Milkis The New York Times
“Executive orders cannot create new laws, appropriate funds or override existing legislation; those are powers reserved for Congress,” said Melody Barnes, executive director of UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy. “They must be rooted in existing constitutional or statutory authority, and they can be challenged in court or overturned by subsequent administrations.”
Melody Barnes, Rachel Augustine Potter, and Sidney Milkis UVA Today
The panel discussion, entitled “The 2024 Election and the Struggle for America’s Economic Future,” examined how conflicting views about the health of the current economy in the United States could affect campaigns for the White House and Congress.
Scott Miller, Sidney Milkis The Statehouse File
The Miller Center hosts a conversation with Suzanne Mettler, professor of American institutions at Cornell University; Paul Glastris, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly magazine; and Scott Miller, director of the Miller Center's Project on Democracy and Capitalism, to consider how the current conflicts over the political economy in the United States are likely to affect the approaching campaign for the White House and Congress.
Scott Miller, Sidney Milkis Miller Center Presents
As we head toward the 2024 election, partisan dysfunction threatens to fracture the United States Congress, one of the pillars of our American constitutional system. When did Congress work better, and why? How could it function well again?

Sidney Milkis, the Miller Center's White Burkett Miller Professor of Governance and Foreign Affairs, moderates a conversation about the past, present, and future of Congress with William Galston, Molly Reynolds, and Philip Wallach, whose new book, Why Congress, was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best political books of 2023.
Sidney Milkis, William Antholis Miller Center Presents
Three leading experts on American presidents—Sidney Milkis and Barbara Perry of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, and Stephen Knott of Ashland University—warn about the increasingly demagogic nature of the presidency.
Barbara Perry, Sidney Milkis National Constitution Center