Michael Bernhard
Raymond and Miriam Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair
313 Anderson Hall
(352) 273-2387
Office hours: M 9:00-12:00
About Me
Michael H. Bernhard is the inaugural holder of the Raymond and Miriam Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair in Political Science at the University of Florida. His work centers on questions of democratization and development both globally and in the context of Europe. Among the issues that have figured prominently in his research agenda are the role of civil society in democratization, institutional choice in new democracies, the political economy of democratic survival, and the legacy of extreme forms of dictatorship.
Prior to coming to Florida, Bernhard was on the faculty of Penn State University for twenty years. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at Warsaw University and the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He has delivered public lectures at a large number of public and private universities in the United States and Europe, and has conducted archival and field work in Poland, Germany, England, and Hungary.
In his career Bernhard has held a number of important administrative responsibilities -- including departmental undergraduate officer, founder and coordinator of two study abroad programs (to Maastricht in the Netherlands, and Lille in France), faculty senator, member of the editorial board of Penn State Press, and the chair of the editorial committee of the newsletter of the comparative democratization section of the American Political Science Association.
Bernhard received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and has graduate degrees from Yale (M.A. Russian and East European Studies), and Columbia (Ph.D. Political Science). He has taken short-term courses of study at the Louis Kossuth University in Debrecen (Hungary), Jagellonian University in Krakow (Poland), the Catholic University of Lublin (Poland), and Goethe Institute in Boppard am Rhein (Germany).
