Obama and the Liberal Dilemma in Power

Alan Brinkley

Alan Brinkley, Allan Nevins Professor of History, specializes in the history of twentieth-century America. From 2003 to 2009, he was University Provost, and before that chair of the Department of History. In 1998-99, he was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. His published works include Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (Knopf, 1982), which won the 1983 National Book Award; The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (Knopf, 1992); The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (Knopf, 1995); Liberalism and Its Discontents (Harvard, 1998); Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Oxford, forthcoming 2009); and The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (Knopf, forthcoming 2010).

He was the recipient of the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize at Harvard and the Great Teacher Award at Columbia. He is chairman of the board of trustees of the Century Foundation, a trustee of Oxford University Press, a trustee of the National Humanities Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He taught previously at M.I.T., Harvard, Princeton, and the City University of New York Graduate School. He received his A.B. from Princeton and his Ph.D. from Harvard.