Michael Curtis is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of political science at Rutgers University. He is highly regarded as an expert in several fields—political theory, comparative government, European politics, and the Middle East. Among his approximately thirty books, a few should be singled out as being particularly important and influential. His analysis of the rise of antidemocratic and anti-Semitic ideology in France after the Dreyfus affair in a book called Three Against the Third Republic is considered the definitive study of this era in early twentieth-century French political history. Other books pertaining to this subject are Totalitarianism, a study of the twentieth-century European totalitarian regimes, and Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary World. The latter book is a collection based on the papers delivered at a groundbreaking conference Professor Curtis organized in the1980s. This book continues to be referred to today as laying out some of the most important theory about the origins, rise, and persistence of anti-Semitism throughout the world.

In addition, Professor Curtis is considered an expert on the Middle East. His many books on this area of the world cover a number of subjects. He was one of the first to discuss the tangled web of the interconnections between religion and politics in the Muslim world in Religion and Politics in the Middle East. Other significant books on the Middle East include Israel: Social Structure and Change and Israel in the Third World. Professor Curtis is the author, as well, of textbooks that cover political theory, comparative government, and European government structure. These textbooks are used throughout the United States. One is currently in its fifth edition. Professor Curtis has been an activist as well as a scholar. For many years, he was the president of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East and editor of the Middle East Review. As such he was often called upon by the press and television for comments as problems arose in the Middle East conflict over the last decades.