Book Talk | Julia R. Azari | Backlash Presidents: Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Monday, February 23 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Julia R. Azari. She will discuss her book, Backlash Presidents: Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History, with Kimberley Johnson and Joe Lowndes.
Julia R. Azari is professor of political science at Marquette University. She is the author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate and the editor (with Lara M. Brown and Zim G. Nwokora) of The Presidential Leadership Dilemma: Between the Constitution and a Political Party. Her work has been featured widely in the media, including The New York Times, MSNBC, Politico, and FiveThirtyEight.
Kimberley Johnson is Professor in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University, an Associate Professor at NYU Politics and an affiliated faculty at NYU Wagner. Johnson’s research focuses on urban and metropolitan politics, federalism and intergovernmental relations, race and ethnic politics, and American political development, particularly the intersection between state and society. Johnson is the author of numerous articles as well as two books, Governing the American State (Princeton University Press) and Reforming Jim Crow (Oxford University Press). She is the author of Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis (2025), which explores the rise of Black Power urbanism in four cities across the U.S., including Oakland, California, and Newark, New Jersey.
Joe Lowndes is a scholar of US politics at Hunter College, with a specific focus on right-wing politics, populism, and race. Among other publications, he is the author of From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (Yale University Press), and co-author with Daniel Martinez HoSang of Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press). Along with scholarly work, he is published frequently in public venues including the Washington Post and The New Republic. He is currently co-editing a volume titled The Politics of the Multiracial Right (New York University Press in 2025).; and he is at work on another book, Adventures in Post-Democracy, which seeks to explain the growing authoritarian trend in American political culture through a chronicle of his ethnographic work in right-wing spaces over the last decade (University of California Press 2025). Before coming to Hunter, Lowndes was Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.