Kinder Institute Professor of Missouri History & Constitutional Democracy, Professor of History, jroll@missouri.edu
Professor Jarod Roll specializes in modern United States labor and working-class history, with an emphasis on Missouri. His scholarship has focused on rural workers, both agricultural and industrial. Roll’s teaching interests also include American political and social history from the Gilded Age to the Great Society, especially in the New Deal era. He received his PhD in History from Northwestern University.

Roll is the author of Poor Man’s Fortune: White Working-Class Conservativism in American Metal Mining, 1850-1950 (2020) and Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (2010). He is coauthor of The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (2011). His books have won the Clark Spence Award from the Mining History Association, the H. L. Mitchell Award from the Southern Historical Association, the C. L. R. James Award from the Working Class History Association, and the Missouri History Book Award from the State Historical Society of Missouri. Roll’s essays have appeared in several edited collections as well as the Journal of Southern History, LABOR, Labor History, Religion and American Culture, and Radical History Review, among other journals. He is currently completing a coauthored study of the Congress of Industrial Organization’s union of agricultural workers from the Great Depression to the Cold War.

Prior to joining the University of Missouri, Roll taught at the University of Mississippi and the University of Sussex. A native of Mount Vernon, Missouri, Roll received his BA in History from Missouri Southern State University. His hobbies include hiking and rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Kinder Institute Assistant Professor of Missouri Politics & Constitutional Democracy, Assistant Professor of Political Science, sjlacombe@missouri.edu
Scott LaCombe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Truman School of Government & Public Affairs and an Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the Kinder Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Iowa.

Scott studies American politics with a focus on state-level institutions, policy diffusion, and political responsiveness. His research examines how states learn from one another, how institutional rules shape policy outcomes, and how citizens influence—or fail to influence—state policymaking. He combines quantitative methods, including network analysis, with theories of federalism to better understand the dynamics of policy change in the American states.

He also investigates how policies shape population health, economic outcomes, and political behavior. In addition to peer-reviewed publications, he is a co-author of Choosing the Future: Technology and Opportunity in Communities with Karen Mossberger and Caroline Tolbert (Oxford University Press).

Kinder Institute Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy, Assistant Professor of Political Science, eregier@missouri.edu
Emily F. Regier is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Truman School of Government & Public Affairs and an Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the Kinder Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Emily focuses on American constitutionalism, public law, and legal theory. Her research connects prominent models of judicial decision making to different conceptions of democracy. Her work suggests that dominant accounts of judicial decision making in terms of judicial ideology and/or strategic action are too narrow. A fuller understanding of judicial decision making requires attention to the political suppositions of different legal frameworks, including, importantly, their understandings of and orientations toward democracy.

Emily is particularly interested in the development and legacy of the mid-twentieth century institutional-competence-based framework for legal decision making known as Legal Process Theory. She also has research interests in American pragmatism and feminist theory.

Kinder Institute Associate Teaching Professor of Constitutional Democracy and History, lsantoro@missouri.edu
Dr. Lily Santoro is an Associate Professor of Historic Preservation and History at Southeast Missouri State University, where she teaches courses in early American History and Public History. Dr. Santoro earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in American History from the University of Delaware and completed her B.A. in History at the University of Southern California. She holds certificates in Museum Studies from the University of Delaware and Digital Archives and Records Management from San Jose State University.

Dr. Santoro’s current research explores the discourse of popularized science in mid-nineteenth century African American newspapers. Focusing on discussions of topics such as polygenism and comparative anatomy, this study attempts to expand our understanding of the conversations the Black community had among themselves about scientific racism and citizenship as the politics of race shifted between the 1820s and 1870s. Her previous publications focused on the popularization of science in early national Philadelphia and ideas of national identity in popular print culture such as almanacs and periodicals in the late eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic.

Dr. Santoro is also an active public historian with experience as a project archivist, collections assistant, and exhibit curator. In partnership with the Bollinger Center for Regional History, she is spearheading the Southeast Missouri History Gateway project, a digital history project that provides training, consultation, and digital platform to under-resourced cultural heritage institutions to digitize archival collections for public access. She joins the Kinder Institute during AY 2023-24 as a Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow.

Kinder Institute Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy, Assistant Professor of Political Science, czug@missouri.edu
Charles U. Zug is Kinder Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri. He received his Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin. His expertise is in American political development and constitutional theory, with a focus on the American presidency and the relationship between ideas and institutional development. In addition to scholarly articles, book chapters, and popular press writings, he is the author of Demagogues in American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act (University Press of Kansas, 2024). Among other projects, he is currently writing a book tentatively titled Constructing a Mythology of American Federalism.

Assistant Teaching Professor (Kinder Institute, Honors College, Truman School), mfghp@missouri.edu
Originally from Kirkwood, MO, Matthew Frierdich received his B.A. in History and Government from Drury University, his M.Div from Vanderbilt Divinity School, and his Ph.D. in Political Theory from University of Virginia. Prior to joining the Mizzou faculty as an Assistant Teaching Professor, jointly appointed in the Honors College, Kinder Institute, and Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, he served as a board-certified chaplain at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. At the Honors College and Kinder Institute, he co-coordinates the new Revolutions and Constitutions social science sequence. His dissertation at UVA, entitled “Turning Rubble and Memory into Seeds: Visions of Democracy in Monument Removal,” focuses on how activism around public memorializations of race and racialized violence offer possibilities and pitfalls for the work of social transformation. As memory becomes a popular political vernacular for articulating justice in the U.S. and elsewhere, the project considers how memory activism raises questions about what democratic engagement must become to cultivate new ways of being human.

To stay grounded in an otherwise chaotic world, Dr. Frierdich loves to tend to his garden, mostly vegetables and a few flowers. He also stays invested in Marvel comics, horror films, and anywhere that sells used books. His partner Emily, son Ezra, and cats Zelda and Tish fill up his cup every day.

 

Kinder Institute Associate Professor of Slavery and Atlantic World History, Associate Professor of History, mpnevius@missouri.edu
Marcus P. Nevius is Associate Professor of Slavery and Atlantic World History at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, jointly appointed in the Department of History. He leads undergraduate and graduate seminars in topics of slavery, the Revolution, Confederation, and Early Republican periods in the early United States, and seminar topics in the history of the African diaspora in the Atlantic world.

Nevius is the author of City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (University of Georgia Press, 2020). He has also published “New Histories of Marronage in the Anglo-Atlantic World and Early America,” in History Compass, and “Global Warfare, Conspiracy Scares, and Slave Revolts in a World of Fear,” Review of Books, in the William and Mary Quarterly. He has published book reviews in Slavery and Abolition, the Journal of African American History, the Journal of Southern History, and H-Net Civil War.

Nevius’ work has been supported by research fellowships granted by the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan; the Special Collections Research Center of the Earl Gregg Swem Library at the College of William and Mary; the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon; and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond.

Nevius holds the Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University, and the B.A. and M.A. in history from North Carolina Central University.

Kinder Institute Associate Director, colemanw@missouri.edu
Billy Coleman is Associate Director of the Kinder Institute, teaches and co-coordinates the Kinder-Honors sequence in Revolutions and Constitutions, and directs the Kinder Institute Democracy Lab. He is the author of Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865 (University of North Carolina Press)—winner of the American Musicological Society’s H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Award—and his research exploring the relationship between music and politics in early America also appears in the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of the Early Republic, and Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature. He was Book Reviews Editor of American Nineteenth Century History for five years and most recently co-edited Music in American Nineteenth-Century History (Routledge, 2025). Dr. Coleman completed a Ph.D. in History at University College London (UCL) and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Kinder Institute and the University of British Columbia before returning to the Kinder Institute in 2020. Born in Houston, Texas, he grew up in Sydney, Australia, where he graduated with a BA (Hons) in history and politics from the University of New South Wales (UNSW). 

 

Kinder Professor of British History, Professor of History, r.fletcher@missouri.edu
Rob Fletcher is Kinder Professor of British History and Professor of History at the University of Missouri. His work explores the history of Britain and its empire in the modern period, and the interplay of national, transnational, and global histories. He grew up in Colchester, England, and read Modern History at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He lived in Tokushima, Japan, before returning to Oxford to complete his doctoral studies. He has previously held positions as the Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Global History at Oxford, Lecturer in Imperial and Global History at the University of Exeter, and Reader in the History of Britain and Empire at the University of Warwick.

Professor Fletcher’s research on the history of Britain’s empire is wide-ranging, and has appeared in Past and Present, The English Historical Review, Journal of Historical Geography, and Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. He is the author of British Imperialism and ‘The Tribal Question’: Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919-1936 (Oxford University Press, 2015), which told the story of what happened when the British empire and Bedouin communities met on the desert frontiers between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. His second book, The Ghost of Namamugi (Amsterdam University Press, 2019) provided an examination of mercantile ambition and imperial power in Shanghai and Yokohama in the mid-nineteenth century.

Professor Fletcher has been the Principal Investigator on a number of research projects supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, including a Science in Culture award on the international campaign against the desert locust in the twentieth century. In conducting his research, he has collaborated with a number of museums and public organisations in the UK, Europe, and Australia. His current book project examines Britain’s historic relationship with the world’s desert environments.

Kinder Institute Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy, Assistant Professor of Political Science, jcikuta@missouri.edu
Jennie Ikuta is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Truman School of Government & Public Affairs and an Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the Kinder Institute. Born in San Diego and raised in Yokohama, Japan, she returned to the United States as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago (2007) and completed her Ph.D. in political theory at Brown University (2014).

As a political theorist, Ikuta’s research interests center on the role of moral psychology in politics, especially in 19th- and 20th-century political thought. Her first book, Contesting Conformity: Democracy and the Paradox of Political Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines the thought of Tocqueville, Mill, and Nietzsche in order to investigate the notion of nonconformity and its relationship to modern democracy. Articles drawn from this project have been published in Constellations (2017) and Philosophy & Social Criticism (2015).

Since then, she has turned her attention to the kinds of motivations necessary for generating social change in contexts of historical injustice. This is the focus of her second book project, White Losses: Moral Psychology and the Demands of Racial Justice, which is under advance contract at Oxford University Press. This project employs the thought of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin—in conjunction with analyses of popular forms of American liberalism and contemporary political theory—to illuminate the psychological transformations required by members of historically dominant groups for the sake of a more egalitarian society. Articles drawn from this project have been published in The Journal of Politics (2021) and Polity (2022); another is forthcoming in Political Theory.