The Campus and the Capitol: Higher Education and Federal Power
Susan McWilliams Barndt is the 2025-2026 William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow in Government at Claremont McKenna College.
McWilliams Barndt is the author of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (2018) and Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory (2014), the editor of A Political Companion to James Baldwin (2017), and a co-editor of several books, including The Best Kind of College (2015).
Her writing and commentary have appeared in media such as The Atlantic, Business Insider, KPCC's AirTalk, LiveNOW From FOX, The Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, the Tavis Smiley Show, and Today in LA on KNBC.
For her work, McWilliams Barndt has received the Graves Award in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the Jack Miller Center's Teaching Excellence Award. Since 2006, McWilliams Barndt has taught at Pomona College, where she has won the Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching four times.
McWilliams holds a B.A. in political science and Russian from Amherst, an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from Princeton, and a Certificate in Advanced Educational Leadership from Harvard.