Home » News & Events » Past Speakers » Ira Katznelson

Ira Katznelson

Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History
Columbia University

Ira Katznelson (Ph.D., Cambridge University, 1969) is an Americanist whose work has straddled comparative politics and political theory, as well a political and social history. He returned in the Fall 1994 to Columbia, where he had been an assistant and associate professor from 1969-1974. In the interim, he taught at the University of Chicago, chairing its department of political science from 1979 to 1982, and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he was Dean from 1983-1989.

His most recent books are When Affirmative Action Was White (2005), and Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (2003). Other books include Black Men, White Cities (1973), City Trenches (1981), Schooling for All (with Margaret Weir, 1985), Marxism and the City (1992), and Liberalism’s Crooked Circle (1996). He has co-edited Working Class Formation (with Aristide Zolberg, 1986), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (with Pierre Birnbaum, 1995), Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (with Martin Shefter, 2002), Political Science: The State of the Discipline, Centennial Edition (with Helen Milner, 2002), and Preferences and Situations: Points of Intersection Between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalism (with Barry Weingast, 2005).
Professor Katznelson was President of the American Political Science Association for 2005-2006. Previously, he served as President of the Politics and History Section of APSA, President of the Social Science History Association, and Chair of the Russell Sage Foundation Board of Trustees. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Research Interests: American politics, comparative politics, political theory, urban politics, European studies, race relations, class formation, ethnicity and regligion, education, urban geography, identities and interests, social movements, political parties.

The information listed above was provided at the time of the speaker's visit and may no longer be current.