Mike Bell is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also serves as Director of the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, and is a member of the faculty of the Agroecology Masters Program and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

As a scholar, Mike iis principally an environmental sociologist and a theorist. Three central foci can be found in all of his work: dialogics, the sociology of nature, and social justice. These concerns for the world have led him to studies of agroecology, the body, community, consumption, culture, food, democracy, development, economic sociology, gender, inequality, participation, place, rurality, the sociology of music, and more.

Mike likes books and is the author or an editor of eight, three of which have won national awards. His books include:

An Invitation to Environmental Sociology (4th edition, 2012)

The Strange Music of Social Life: A Dialogue on Dialogic Sociology (2011)

Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life (2006)

Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability (2004)

Walking Toward Justice: Democratization in Rural Life (2003)

Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words (1998)

Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village (1994)

The Face of Connecticut: People, Geology, and the Land (1985)

Currently, Mike is working on three more books: one on religion and ecology, another on the theory of agroecology (with Bill Bland), and a textbook on qualitative methods (with Jason Orne).

He is also working with a cooperative of 800 smallholder farmers in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa on an agroecological approach to health and development. The LAND (Livelihood, Agroecology, Nutrition, and Development) Project is the product of a partnership between CIAS, Indwe Trust, Kidlinks World, and the farmers themselves.

Mike has a second life as a composer of contemporary classical and folk music, and as a folk musician. Mike's compositions include pieces for the violin family, the mandolin family, solo piano, symphony orchestra, and various chamber ensembles. His recent compositional work has been for the band Graminy, developing a dialogue between grassroots and classical traditions that Graminy likes to call "class-grass" music. Mike also continues to write tunes and songs that contibute to a variety of folk traditions, especially bluegrass and contradance music. His classical composition draws much of its inspiration from these traditions as well.

As a performer, Mike mainly favors the mandolin, his vote for the most beautiful instrument in the world, and the guitar. Currently, he plays mandolin with Graminy and guitar with the Elm Duo, an acoustic duo with his daughter.