Todd Michney, Visiting Assistant Professor, specializes in U.S. history, focusing on urban history, African American history, race, ethnicity, and labor. He received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 2004, under the direction of the late Rudolph J. Vecoli.
His current research is on African American middle-class identity in the twentieth century, and especially notions of prestige as related to housing and locale. Michney is currently working on a book manuscript, entitled Changing Neighborhoods: Black Upward Mobility in Twentieth-Century Cleveland, an expansion of his dissertation into a citywide study of that city’s black middling classes. He has a developing interest in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), as an emergent historical methodology with the potential to represent statistical data and settlement patterns in strikingly new and innovative ways.
While his teaching centers, in the broadest sense, around identity and in particular issues relating to race and inequality in the twentieth century city, Michney has offered courses on topics ranging from the U.S. welfare state, to “whiteness” as a racial identity, to environmental history, and most recently at Toledo, African civilizations.