Michael Slaven

Michael Slaven is Professor of History at PennWest University.  He has been teaching at the California campus for more than three decades and has been an active, engaged scholar and academic for his entire tenure at the university.  He received his doctoral degree from West Virginia University in Early Modern European History and has specialized analyzing the uses of propaganda in politics and art ever since.  Dr. Slaven received his B.A. with magna cum laude distinction and was chosen as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most well-respected academic honorary society.

Since coming to California, Dr. Slaven has held a wide variety of positions of service to the university including Faculty Senate President for two terms and more recently serving as departmental chair for eight years.  He has at various times had a variety of programs under his supervision including Arabic, archaeology, art, history, jurisprudence, Spanish, legal studies, sociology, social deviance, political science, and women’s studies. 

Michael Slaven has been a productive scholar, with three book chapters published in recent years by respected scholarly presses Palgrave MacMillan and Routledge. In the last decade he has presented his research at more than twenty academic conferences, both nationally and internationally, in a variety of related fields including Congressional elections, voting demographics and statistical metropolitan areas, Italian, French and South Korean strategies of public political protest, art history and criticism, and the role of women in modern DJ culture. He has also published critical reviews of art exhibitions and contributed to West Virginia University’s Library exhibition on Voter Suppression in 2020. He has been an invited featured speaker twice at the Art Museum of West Virginia University in their Art Up Close series. He is currently working on a large-scale research project studying political demonstrations and mass actions in world capital cities in the twentieth century. He has completed a good deal of research on Rome. London, Paris, and Seoul and has plans to conduct research in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and perhaps Beirut.

Michael Slaven’s interests outside academia include birding, and he currently serves as the chief reviewer for West Virginia’s bird reports for Cornell University’s eBird project, as well as being on the West Virginia Bird Review Committee, which evaluates rare sightings for the state’s official bird list. He also writes a quarterly column for The Redstart, a well-received regional birding journal from The Brooks Birding Club, with a national audience.  Dr. Slaven is also an avid fly-fisher, amateur astronomer, and a serious DJ and producer, who has performed under the stage name Sonik Professor in the eastern U.S. for more than a dozen years and has been a regular DJ on FFZ Radio and Underground Kollectiv, both based in the UK, with a worldwide audience. He had a show on WCAL which he hopes to return to the airwaves soon.