Historian of American Politics, Religion, & Law
Prof. Michael Breidenbach is an historian of American religion, politics, law, and culture. He is Dean of the Honors College and Professor of History at Ave Maria University. He is also a Senior Affiliate for Legal Humanities at the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania.
He is the author of Our Dear-Bought Liberty: Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2021), which was runner-up for the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award. He is also co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the First Amendment and Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His books have been been cited in four U.S. Supreme Court amicus briefs. His next two projects are on Black Catholicism in America and on the politics of naming in Revolutionary America. His writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, Washington Post, and First Things.
Dr. Breidenbach was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022. He was previously a Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida; Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University; Visiting Scholar at St. John's College, Corpus Christi College, and Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University; Visiting Scholar and Senior Member at Wolfson College, Cambridge University; Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University; Research Associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania; Thomas W. Smith Fellow at Villanova University; and Honorary Fellow at the Collegium Institute. He has also been quoted in or appeared on national television, radio, and newspaper outlets.
He obtained his Ph.D. in History from King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge Overseas Trust Scholar. He was a visiting graduate student in History at the Sorbonne in Paris and earned his M.Phil. with Distinction in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. He graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with departmental honors from Northwestern University with a B.A. in History and American Studies. He also received a Level 3 Award with Merit in Wines from the London-based Wine & Spirit Education Trust.
He lives in Southwest Florida with his wife, Janice Chik Breidenbach, Chair and Professor of Philosophy at Ave Maria University, and their son.