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.