Michael Meranze is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined UCLA as Professor of History in 2006 after teaching in the History Department at the University of California, San Diego since 1989. Prior to that, he was 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 to 1989. Meranze received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has held leadership roles including Chair of the UCLA Academic Senate and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Affairs in the History Department. He is affiliated with the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion and the Luskin Center for History and Policy.

Meranze's research focuses on United States intellectual and legal history, with an emphasis on early America. His interests encompass the history of the body, the death penalty, conscience, the relationship between the European Enlightenment and the present, religion, reason, and politics in the Age of Revolution, as well as criminal law and the colonial project. He is the author of Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835, which explores the emergence of the penitentiary within the contradictions of the American Revolution and early liberalism. Meranze edited a volume of Benjamin Rush’s essays, co-edited Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution, and contributed to America's Death Penalty: Between Past and Present. He is preparing an essay on criminal law and the colonial project for the forthcoming Cambridge History of Law in America. Among his grants are those from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. Meranze has published on higher education issues, including articles featured in the American Association of University Professors journal and reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Currently, he is engaged in two long-term projects: an analysis of sensibility and violence in the Revolutionary Atlantic and a rethinking of the American death penalty from the eighteenth century to the present.

Professional Email: meranze@history.ucla.edu