White Burkett Miller Professor of Governance and Foreign Affairs
Fast Facts
- Author of What Happened to the Vital Center?
- White Burkett Miller Professor of Governance and Foreign Affairs
- Award-winning educator
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.
Featured Publications
Sidney Milkis News Feed
Ronald Reagan and the new Christian Right viewed their alliance as the vanguard of a campaign to rally conservative Democrats to their side.
The uneasy collaboration between Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement marked a development more than fifty years in the making thanks to the advent of the modern presidency during the Progressive Era.
The pivotal relationship between Lincoln and the abolitionists was among the first to reveal that presidential-movement alliances could be a critical dimension of American political development.
America's ongoing to struggle to reconcile its ideals with practical governing considerations—especially existing power structures—is captured in tensions between its two most important founding documents. After watching this conversation with the Miller Center's Sid Milkis, you may never think of the Declaration and Constitution in the same way again.
Popular expectations of the presidency were changing, and not just when a storm hit. The bigger the federal government became, the more a president had to act as a warming face of that distant behemoth—and its avatar on TV. “In the ’60s, expectations exploded,” says Sidney Milkis, a political scientist and Miller Center fellow at the University of Virginia. “We’ve become a presidency-obsessed democracy.” A key question, Milkis says, is “whether 300 million people can expect so much from one individual and still consider themselves involved in something that can be described as self-government.”
The Atlantic
University of Virginia politics professor Sidney Milkis lectures on James F. Byrnes, who served in the U.S. House and Senate, as a Supreme Court Justice and in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. He explains how Byrnes, in the 1930s and '40s, was a key figure in the implementation of the New Deal and the management of the wartime economy. Mr. Milkis describes the relationship between FDR and Byrnes and how their work shaped the United States in a time of great uncertainty. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer introduces the speaker. The Supreme Court Historical Society hosted the event in the Supreme Court chamber.
C-SPAN