Biography

Matthew Holden, Jr. was Doherty Professor from 1981 to 2002.  He was President of the American Political Science Association, the Policy Studies Organization, and a Board Member of the Social Science Council.  His primary fields of interest are executive politics and public administration and public policy, and he continues to advocate a strong connection between the content of political science and the worlds of both private and public government.

He has been Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, and has served on at  least three Federal advisory commissions dealing with energy and/or environment.

He has published Continuity & Disruption: Essays in Public Administration, The Divisible Republic (on race in the American polity), and a variety of articles in political science and other journals, including articles on “The Governance of the Metropolis as a Problem in Diplomacy” (Journal of Politics), “’Imperialism’ in Bureaucracy” (American Political Science Review), and his  APSA presidential address, “The Competence of Political Science: ‘Progress in Political Research’ Revisited.”

He is near the end of a major work on public administration and political power based on his 2001  lectures at the University of Oklahoma, is writing on counter-emancipation as a result of his work over the past seven years on the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, has initiated new study of Isaiah T. Montgomery, the sole African American delegate in the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890.

Holden also was a regular faculty member at Wayne State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Wisconsin and a visiting faculty member at the University of Vermont, the University of Colorado, Cornell University, Jackson State University.

Holden has also maintained strong connections with the Abraham Lincoln Association, the Illinois State Historical Society, the Mississippi Historical Society, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.  Holden’s papers have been deposited in the University of Virginia Archives.