Shamira Gelbman has been on the Wabash faculty since 2012. In addition to a wide range of courses on American politics, she has taught a freshman tutorial on bodybuilding and interdisciplinary courses on the civil rights movement, immigration policy, health, and the political history of Wabash College.

Dr. Gelbman’s research focuses primarily on the interest group and social movement organizations play in American politics. Her book, The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction (Temple University Press, 2021), explores how nearly a hundred organizations collaborated to lobby for federal civil rights legislation during the 1950s and 1960s. She’s also the editor of Clio, the biannual newsletter of the American Political Science Association’s Politics and History section.

A native of Brooklyn, NY, Dr. Gelbman attended the City University of New York’s Hunter College before heading south to the University of Virginia for her graduate degrees. Before coming to Wabash, she taught at Illinois State University for five years. In her free time, she enjoys weightlifting, painting, and road tripping.