Megan Ming Francis

Megan Ming Francis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. Francis received her doctorate in Politics at Princeton University. Before joining the faculty at UW, Francis was on the faculty at Pepperdine University for four years. Francis’s work sits at the intersection of American politics, race, constitutional law, and history. She is particularly interested in the construction of rights and citizenship, black political activism, and the politics of capitalism.

She is the author of Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State (Cambridge University Press, 2014). This book argues the NAACP played a pivotal role in the growth of federal court power in criminal procedure and subsequently in civil rights by helping the Supreme Court wrestle away jurisdiction from state courts in the first quarter of the 20th century. Francis is currently at work on a second book project that examines the role of the criminal justice system in the rebuilding of southern political and economic power after the Civil War.