Tonight: Penn's Rogers Smith on Obama and racial politics

?Barack Obama and the Future of American Racial Politics? is the title of lecture to be presented tonight by University of Pennsylvania scholar Rogers Smith. Free and open to the public, this year?s Ronald J. Fiscus Lecture in Constitutional Law will begin at 8 p.m. tonight in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor and chair of the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches American constitutional law and American political thought, with special interests in issues of citizenship and racial, gender, and class inequalities.

He has published more than 90 essays in academic journals, edited volumes and public-interest publications, including the American Political Science Review, the Western Political Quarterly, Studies in American Political Development, Daedalus, Social Research, Yale Law Journal, the American Prospect, the Nation, and others. He is author or co-author of five books: Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Memberships (Cambridge University Press, 2003); The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (with Philip A. Klinkner, 1999); Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (1997); Citizenship without Consent: The Illegal Alien in the American Polity (with Peter H. Schuck, 1985); and Liberalism and American Constitutional Law (1985, rev. ed. 1990).

Civic Ideals received six ?best book? awards from divisions of the American Political Science Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Social Science History Association, and the Association of American Publishers. It was also a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in history. The Unsteady March received the 2000 Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.

Formerly the Alfred Cowles Professor of Government at Yale University, where he taught from 1980 to 2001, Smith also received a Yale College Prize for Distinguished Teaching in the Social Sciences in 1984. He received a Carnegie Corporation of New York ?Scholar's Grant? in 2001-2003 to research a book to be titled Civic Horizons: Achieving Democratic Citizenship in Modern America. He was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 2002-2003 and was recently elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Smith is a graduate of Michigan State University (B.A.) and Harvard University (M.A., Ph.D.).

The Fiscus Lecture was inaugurated in 1991 by Skidmore?s Department of Government to honor the late Ronald J. Fiscus, a Skidmore faculty member from 1980 to his death in 1990. Professor Fiscus was a constitutional law specialist and a key contributor to the development of a minor in law and society at Skidmore.