Michelle Rose
Dr. Michelle Rose is a political theorist in the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice and an Affiliate of Ethnic, Gender, and Queer Studies. She presently serves as the Faculty Advisor for Chico State’s competitive Model UN team and a Faculty Mentor in the REACH program on campus. Dr. Rose holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University, an M.A. in Political Science from UCLA, an M.Phil. in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in Political Science from Loyola Marymount University.
Dr. Rose's research centers on the study of democratic sensibilities, aesthetics, Black political thought, gender and sexuality, 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.
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.
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. L. (forthcoming). "Queering Organicism and Pathologizing Whiteness," in Revisiting Alain Locke: Contemporary Essays on Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, edited by Dr. Jacoby Adeshei Carter and Dr. Sheena Mason. Palgrave Macmillan.
Rose, M. K. L. (2023). “His Is a Reverent Vandalism”: Alain Locke’s Aesthetics and Fugitive Democracy. Political Theory, 51(4), 703-735.