Stephen M. Engel is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Politics at Bates College and an Affiliated Scholar of the American Bar Foundation. His research and teaching focus on American political development, constitutional law, and social movements, particularly LGBTQ+ political, legal, and social mobilization. In 2018, he received Bates College’s Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Engel is the author of four books. His most recent book, Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ+ Lives (New York University Press, 2021), coauthored with Timothy Lyle of Iona College, offers a multidisciplinary examination of public health policy, popular culture, and law. The book demonstrates how politicians, policymakers, judges, media figures, and even some members of LGBTQ+ communities have deployed the concept of dignity in ways that shame and disempower LGBTQ+ individuals. Engel and Lyle argue that dignity—and the pursuit of recognition through its terms—has become a tool of both the state and the marketplace, ultimately constraining its more radical and transformative potential.
His first book, The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2001), examines how the distinct political and institutional environments of the United States and Great Britain shaped the development, strategies, and goals of LGBTQ+ rights movements in each country.
His second book, American Politicians Confront the Courts: Opposition Politics and Changing Responses to Judicial Power (Cambridge University Press, 2011), provides a cross-institutional analysis of how evolving understandings of loyal opposition have influenced both political party development and relations between elected branches of government and the federal judiciary.
His third book, Fragmented Citizens: The Changing Landscape of Gay and Lesbian Lives (New York University Press, 2016), draws on key concepts from American political development, particularly the notions of a fragmented polity and the partial nature of political change, to examine why inequalities affecting gay and lesbian citizens persist in the United States even as formal policies mandating equal treatment have been implemented.
Engel also coedited, with Stephen Skowronek of Yale University and Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School, The Progressives’ Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Making of the American State (Yale University Press, 2016). The volume assesses a century of progressive legal, political, and constitutional reform to evaluate its resilience and limitations while proposing alternative approaches to democratic renewal. The book emerged from a multidisciplinary conference on Progressivism that Engel co-organized at Yale University in fall 2013.
His articles have appeared in leading journals, including Studies in American Political Development, Perspectives on Politics, Constitutional Studies, and Law & Social Inquiry.
Engel’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Bates Faculty Development Fund, the National Science Foundation, the American Bar Foundation, the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School, the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, the Yale University Center for the Study of American Politics, and the Yale University Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies.