2026 Promotion and Tenure Awardees

Lisa R. Gilson

Granted tenure and promoted to associate professor of politics.

Gilson teaches courses on social movements, Black political thought, literature and politics, and democratic theory. Her work focuses on political reaction that rejects institutional paths toward change, from abolitionist movements to contemporary far-right groups.

A political theorist, she is working on a book about the relationship between such social movements and social critics, including artists and writers, and the idea that the various political actors involved in a movement “are each doing particular kinds of things. Each has strengths that are particular to what kind of organizing they’re doing and what kind of protest they are doing.” Gilson has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Research Quarterly, American Political Thought, and Perspectives on Politics. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, and prior to her arrival at Bates, was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.