Distinguished Professor of Political Science
919-962-0414
frankb@unc.edu
Website
Curriculum Vitae
313 Hamilton Hall
Office Hours: MW 2-330 and by appt
Frank R. Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joined the department in 2009 as the first holder of the Richardson professorship. A proud Detroiter, he attended Detroit’s Cass Technical High School and then received all his academic degrees at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (BA 1980; MA 1983, PhD 1986). He held academic positions at The University of Iowa (1986-87); Texas A&M University (1987-98); and Penn State University (1998-2009) where he served as Department Head (1999-2004), Distinguished Professor (2005-07), and then was the first holder of the Bruce R. Miller and Dean D. LaVigne Professorship (2007-09). He has had visiting professor appointments at Caltech (1998-99) and at the universities of Michigan, Washington, Bergen (Norway), Aberdeen (Scotland), the Institute for Public Management (Paris), Sciences Po (Paris), the European University Institute (EUI, Florence, Italy), the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France), the University of Barcelona (Spain), St. Gallen (Switzerland), and Oxford (UK). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2023-24.
He has published scores of academic articles, book chapters, and law reviews and written or edited over a dozen books on various topics of public policy in the US and in comparative perspective, including works on agenda-setting, lobbying, and the policy process. His recent work centers on racial issues within the criminal justice system, from traffic stops to the death penalty. His work has appeared in all the major political science journals, and he has been or currently serves on the editorial boards of a number of major journals in political science and public policy.