Desmond King (professor)

Desmond King FBA
Born	1957 (age 66–67) Dublin, Ireland
Academic background
Education	Trinity College Dublin (BA) Northwestern University (MA, PhD)
Academic work
Institutions	University of Oxford
Doctoral students	Ronan Farrow
Main interests	American government
Notable works	Making Americans, In the Name of Liberalism

Desmond King FBA FRHistS (born 1957) is the Andrew W. Mellon professor of American Government at Nuffield College, Oxford. King was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

Biography

King grew up in Dublin and graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a first in political science and was awarded the Bastable Prize. He went on to carry out his postgraduate studies at Northwestern University, where he worked with Ted Robert Gurr, Alexander Hicks and Jane Mansbridge. He completed his M.A. and PhD at Northwestern, and was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, later moving to an Official Fellowship in Politics at St John's College, Oxford.

King was awarded his DLitt from the University of Oxford. He is an elected fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and several other national academies including the Academia Europaea, the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Arts and the Academy of Social Sciences. He is an Emeritus Fellow of St John's College, Oxford.

Principal publications

Books

1. Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government, Clarendon Press, 1995. ISBN 9780198280163

2. Actively Seeking Work?: The Politics of Unemployment and Welfare Policy in the United States and Great Britain, University of Chicago Press, 1995. ISBN 9780226436227

3. In the Name of Liberalism: Illiberal Social Policy in the USA and Britain, Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 9780198296096

4. Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy, Harvard University Press, 2000. ISBN 9780674000889

5. The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation, Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 9780195306439

6. Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama's America, Princeton University Press, 2011. ISBN 9781400839766

7. Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America, Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN 9781107032927

8. Fed Power: How Finance Wins, Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN 9780197573129