Michael R. Fisher Jr., PhD is Assistant Professor in the political economy of race/racism in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. He has research appointments at the Metropolitan Policy Center at American University, the National Initiative of Mixed-Income Communities at Case Western Reserve University, and the Institute for Gender Studies at the University of South Africa. He is also a 2023–25 Public Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute, a 2023 Pardee RAND Faculty Leader Fellow, and a 2022–23 Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project. 

Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Fisher’s areas of specialization include race, policy, and socio-economic inequality and race and religion. He is editor of Confronting Racism and White Supremacy in the US: Twenty-First-Century Theological Perspectives (Friendship Press, 2024) that is a collection of essays on contemporary issues in the ongoing fight against racial oppression and inequality in the US by scholars of religion, activists, and religious leaders. He is currently working on his first monograph, titled Black Urban Study: Race and Redevelopment in the Inner City (under contract with Georgetown University Press). The book reorients the debate on public housing reform by arguing that mixed-income housing creation as market-driven urban policy must be abandoned given its tragic impact on Black communities in inner-city neighborhoods. 

Dr. Fisher earned his PhD in Religion and African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University and is a proud alumnus of Howard University. Before his career as an educator, Dr. Fisher was a public policy advocate on Capitol Hill. His policy portfolio focused on federal social welfare programs addressing poverty. He later transitioned to local politics and public policy when he became the inaugural Director of Advocacy at a nonprofit organization. There he was responsible for the development of the organization’s policy agenda and advocacy strategy for affordable housing creation and the elimination of chronic homelessness in the nation’s capital, working with other activists, agencies, DC residents, and elected officials in the process. Currently, he serves as a founding steering committee member of the DC Legacy Project: Barry Farm-Hillsdale, a group dedicated to uplifting the Black-led struggle for land and housing in DC.
 

You can learn more about his work at www.mrfisherjr.com. 

Sample Publications 

Fisher, Michael R. Jr., ed., Confronting Racism and White Supremacy in the US: Twenty-First-Century Theological Perspectives. New York: Friendship Press, 2024.

Fisher, Michael R., Jr. and Xavier Picket, eds. Special Issue: “The Religious Situation of Black Studies: A Festschrift for Victor Anderson,” Black Theology: An International Journal 21 (1) (2023). https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/yblt20/21/1.

Fisher, Michael R., Jr., “Foreword: The Religious Situation of Black Studies Then and Now.” Black Theology 21, no. 1 (2023): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2023.2180132.

Fisher, Michael R., Jr. “Social Housing Can Solve Bay Area’s Affordable Housing Crisis.” The Mercury News. October 1, 2022. https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/10/01/opinion-social-housing-can-solve-bay-areas-affordable-housing-crisis.

Fisher, Michael R., Jr. “Disenfranchising the Unhoused: Urban Redevelopment, the Criminalization of Homelessness, and the Peril of Prosperity Theology in Dallas and Beyond” in Manuel J. Mejido Costoya, ed., Land of Stark Contrasts: Faith-Based Responses to Homelessness in the United States (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hw3xh5.6

Please see the attached pdf Curriculum Vitae (CV) below.