MJ Bosia, PhD, ISA Executive Director
Professor of Political Science and International Relations
Saint Michael’s College, Vermont

Mike, recognized for their service to ISA with the Ladd Hollist Award in 2023, was chair of the committees on the Status of Representation and Diversity and on Professional Rights and Responsibilities, as well as a member of the Presidential Ad Hoc Committee on ISA in the World. Mike was elected Vice President and served on the Executive Committee. Earlier, they were a founding organizer of the LGBTQA Caucus of ISA, where they have served on the executive committee, and served as a section head and on committees at APSA. Mike has also been a fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

Appointed to the faculty at Saint Michael’s College, Mike earned a PhD at Northwestern University, working there they focuses on historical and constructivist approaches to French politics, political economy, and national mythmaking. Mike’s initial research was on activist organizing in response to HIV/AIDS policy and, in particular, l’affaire du sang contaminé in France, with field research supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. In this research, they focused on the leading role of LGBT activists in the 1990s in bridging issues of political accountability, neoliberal globalization, immigrant rights, North-South cooperation, global LGBT rights, multiculturalism and identity. This work was published in Perspectives on Politics, New Political Science, and French Politics, Culture, & Society, and in edited volumes. After opening a restaurant with their partner in an emerging sustainable food hub in rural Vermont, Mike began research on food sovereignty, which resulted in collaboration on an article published in Globalizations and the edited volume, Globalization and Food Sovereignty (with Peter Andrée, Jeffrey Ayres, and Marie Massicotte).

Their work on alternative conceptions of sovereign communities led Mike to new directions in scholarship on global sexual and diversity politics, resulting in collaboration with Meredith Wiess on the groundbreaking volume, Global Homophobia: States Movements and the Politics of Oppression, which shifted attention from arguments that LGBT rights movements fomented emerging communities outside the west, to the role of state and political homophobia in crafting a “gay peril” and concomitant LGBT identities where none had been politicized. Their work was on the cusp of the emergence of a modular political homophobia within global networks, through which authoritarian movements crafted a set of similar laws, policies, rhetorics, and practices that frame LGBT rights as decedent, foreign, and colonial. Mike’s focus on state homophobia instigated their interrogation of questions of security and LGBT human rights that came to preoccupy western governments and global activists, leading to a critique of the reliance on sovereign states as advocates for and guarantors of rights for sexual and gender minorities. This work has been published in The Journal of Human Rights, International Political Sociology, The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Security, and Sexualities in World Politics, as well as the Oxford Handbook on Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics that Mike coedited with Sandra McEvoy and Momin Rahman.

Prior to attending Northwestern, Mike was the District Staff Director for Senator Milton Marks of San Francisco and Marin Counties, and the Consultant for the Senate Committee on Hate Crimes. Mike began working in the California State Legislature as a Senate Fellow following graduation from California State University, Sacramento. Born in San Francisco and raised in Marin, and a first-generation college student, Mike brought a unique perspective to policy work, having just come out, and in facing the first years of the AIDS pandemic. They worked as part of a small group of public health and LGBT advocates inside and outside the Capitol in developing a unique model of comprehensive services, treatment, protections, research, and prevention education. In San Francisco, Mike would focus on an array of LGBT issues and manage a staff representing constituents in one of the most diverse cities in the U.S., and coordinated the Senator’s responses in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake.

Mike and their husband, Steven Obranovich, live in Vermont.