Associate Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies & Director of Gender, Diversity & Social Justice
My research and teaching interests focus on how “out groups” — those existing outside or on the margins of mainstream U.S. society — survive, thrive and bring about social change. This includes the study of civil, women’s and LGBTQIA rights movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. I am currently completing the manuscript for a book on the emergence of women entrepreneurs in the decades after World War II, and have begun a new project on the ways in which entrepreneurship has served as a form of activism for marginalized groups (women, people of color, LGBTQIA, the poor). I am also writing a chapter for a book on feminist fathering; my chapter will focus on popular television sitcoms of the 1960s and 1970s, feminism and the making of modern fatherhood. Other research interests include the relationship between media/popular culture and gendered perceptions/experiences of aging. In 2016, I was a consultant/member of the scholar working group assisting the Congressional Commission for the proposed American Museum of Women’s History in Washington, D.C.
Debra Michals, “Dads Can Cuddle, Too: Feminism, ’60s Sitcoms and the Making of Modern Fatherhood” in Nicole Willey and Dan Friedman, editors, Feminist Fathering/Fathering Feminists (Forthcoming, 2018, Demeter Press).
Debra Michals, “Stealth Feminists: The Thirtysomething Revolution,” in Robin Morgan, editor, Sisterhood Is Forever (New York: Random House, 2003), 138-144.
Debra Michals, “From ‘Consciousness Expansion’ to ‘Consciousness Raising’: Feminism and the Countercultural Politics of the Self,” in Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, editors, Imagine Nation: American Countercultures in the 1960s and ’70s (New York: Routledge Press: 2002), 41-68.
Mary Beth Norton, Debra Michals, et al. “A People and a Nation” (concise, 8th edition, 2009; concise 9th edition, 2011; concise 10th edition, 2014). (Boston: Wadsworth/Cengage).
Debra Michals, “Standing Their Ground” (women’s efforts to create more equitable workplaces). Smith Alumnae Quarterly, winter 2017-2018.
Debra Michals, “The Rise of the Woman Entrepreneur in the Postwar Era,” A Different Point of View (a publication of the National Women’s History Museum) Volume 25, December 2016.
Debra Michals, “Pakistan’s ‘Rising Stars.’” Smith Alumnae Quarterly, spring 2016.
Merrimack’s alternative spring break program this year saw students participate in international service trips for the first time since 2019.
