Julia Mickenberg is the author of Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, The Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (2006), which won numerous awards; and co-editor of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (2008) and The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature (2011), which won the Children's Literature Association's 2011 Edited Book Award.

Mickenberg's current book project, "Revolutionary Desire: American Women and the Soviet Dream” will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the spring of 2017, in time to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Mickenberg teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on American cultural history since 1865, children’s literature and culture, radicalism in the United States, the cold war, the 1960s, Americans abroad, women radicals and reformers, and, most recently, the history and future of higher education.