| 1 | Name: | Dr. Desmond King | |
| Institution: | University of Oxford | ||
| Year Elected: | 2022 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1957 | ||
Desmond King is the Andrew W Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Nuffield College, and an Emeritus Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. He is a leading scholar of the executive and federal government in US politics, racial inequality, immigration, illiberal forms of government policy often studied comparatively and the politics of social citizenship. His work is both normative and empirical. Drawing on new archival work, his books have documented how the federal government’s employment policies fostered segregation of African Americans in the century to 1975, and the extent to which the US’s founding institutions facilitated persistent discrimination. Subsequent empirical research studies federal responses to the financial crisis of 2008-09 and the rise of unitary executive theory. Professor King was born and educated in Ireland, where he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. After graduate studies at Northwestern University he held lectureships at the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics and Political Science before moving to Oxford University. His publications include Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government (1995/2007), Actively Seeking Work: The Politics of Workfare in the US and Britain (1995), In the Name of Liberalism: Illiberal Social Policy in the US and Britain (1999), Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (2000), with Rogers M. Smith Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America (2011), with Lawrence Jacobs Fed Power: How Finance Wins (2016), and with Stephen Skowronek and John Dearborn, Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (2021). He was awarded a DLitt by Oxford in 2015, and he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003, the Royal Irish Academy in 2014, the Royal Historical Society in 2015, the Academia Europaea in 2016, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. | |||