From Northwestern University:
Michael J. Allen (Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2003) researches US politics and diplomacy in the 20th-century. His book Until The Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) examined the politics of loss that emerged from American defeat in the Vietnam Wars through a history of the POW/MIA movement. His current work-in-progress New Politics: The Imperial Presidency, The Pragmatic Left, and the Problem of Democratic Power, 1933-1981 treats evolving left-liberal relations to presidential power in the postwar era. Focused on the interplay between leading left-liberal thinkers, grassroots activists, beltway politicians, and presidential politics, it argues that growing skepticism toward the presidency on the political left led to the realignment (and polarization) of US party politics, and a broader retreat from liberal reform since the 1960s.