Michael R. Fisher Jr., Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the political economy of race/racism in the Department of African American and African Studies and Assistant Professor by courtesy in City and Regional Planning at The Ohio State University. He holds research affiliations at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Center for the Study of Religion at Ohio State, as well as the Metropolitan Policy Center at American University, NP3: Nurturing People. Power. Place. at Case Western Reserve University, and was a 2023–25 Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. 

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-CenturyTheological Perspectives (Friendship Press, 2024), an anthology on contemporary issues in the ongoing fight against racial oppression and inequality in the US by scholars of religion, activists, and religious leaders published by Friendship Press. 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 is a vehicle for Black communal death in inner-city neighborhoods in the US and must, therefore, be abandoned as urban policy. 

Dr. Fisher earned his Ph.D. 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, D.C. 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 D.C.

“The fight for racial and economic justice is best forged together.”

~ Michael R. Fisher Jr.