Todd Michney

Todd M. Michney is an  Associate Professor in the School of History and Sociology who focuses on urban history, digital history, African American history, and the history of race and ethnicity. Dr. Michney is the author of Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900-1980 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), as well as articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of Planning History, and Reviews in American History. His current research interests include Black building tradesmen 1865-1965, the work and business of construction, as well as the origins of redlining and other racially discriminatory housing policies in the New Deal era. Michney has sat on the board of the Urban History Association and twice served as a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant evaluator.

At Georgia Tech, he was a member of the Center for Urban Innovation's research team from 2015-17, and was awarded three consecutive DILAC grants from 2016-19 to digitize the Ivan Allen Mayoral Papers and develop a customized search interface for that collection. For this project, Michney in 2019 won an award for Excellence in the Educational Use of Historical Records from the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council, and in 2020, he along with two colleagues secured a two-year grant from the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities to continue developing the project's user interface. Michney teaches a Serve-Learn-Sustain-affiliated course entitled “Semester in the City: Engaging Communities,” which involves partnering with organizations that in the past have included the Historic Westside Cultural Arts Council, Emerald Corridor Foundation, Grove Park Foundation, and Greater Vine City Opportunities Program.

From 2018-23, Michney served as the Institute-wide Chair of Georgia Tech's Library/Faculty Advisory Board.  In 2021, he participated in the Commission on Research Next as a member of the Phase II team.