Erik Bleich

Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College

Erik is Charles A. Dana Professor of political science at Middlebury College, where he directs the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project. He publishes widely on race and ethnicity in liberal democracies and is the co-editor of Migrants, Minorities and the Media: Information, Representations and Participation in the Public Sphere.

His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Social Forces, and World Politics and in public venues like The Atlantic, Al Jazeera English, Asahi Shimbun, The Conversation, Financial Times, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Prospect Magazine, and The Washington Post. He has been an invited guest on NPR’s Here and Now, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show, France 24, Danish Public Radio, CBC Radio’s Day 6, and BBC World Service’s The Inquiry.

He is the author of Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking since the 1960s (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and The Freedom to Be Racist? How the United States and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism (Oxford University Press, 2011) and has served as the Chair of the Executive Committee of the Council for European Studies (2019-2021), as a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association (2019-2022), and as Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair (2022).