Desmond King

Biography

Desmond King is the Andrew W Mellon Professor of Government at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Nuffield College. His research interests are the executive state, racial inequality in the US, US-Canada political development and state building, liberalism and migration and comparative welfare policy.

He is the author of The New Right: Politics, Markets and Citizenship (Dorsey, 1987), The State and the City with Ted Robert Gurr (Chicago, 1987), Actively Seeking Work: The Politics of Work-Welfare in the US and Britain (Chicago, 1995), In the Name of Liberalism: Illiberal Social Policies in the US and Britain (Oxford 1999), Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Harvard 2000), The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation (Oxford, 2005), Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government (Oxford 1995/2007),  Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in the Obama Era with Rogers M Smith (Princeton, 2011), Sterilized by the State with Randall Hansen (Cambridge, 2013), Fed Power: How Finance Wins with Lawrence Jacaobs (Oxford, 2016/2021) and Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive with Stephen Skowronek and John Dearborn (Oxford 2021). His many articles have appeared in such journals as American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Past and Present and World Politics.

King has been a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) since 2003, and is also a foreign member of a number of national academies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (FAAAS), the Academia Europaea (MAE), the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA), and the National Academy of Social Insurance (FNASI). He holds a DLitt from the University of Oxford.