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Robert C. Lieberman
International Affairs Building, Room 1414
Interim Dean, School of International and Public Affairs; Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs
Phone: 212-854-4604
robert.lieberman@sipa.columbia.edu
rcl15@columbia.edu
Biography:
Robert C. Lieberman is one of the nation’s foremost experts on American political development, race and politics, and social welfare policy and the welfare state.
Lieberman has served as Interim Dean of SIPA since February 2012. He previously served as Vice Dean (2009 – 2010 and 2011 – 2012), and Chairman of the Department of International and Public Affairs (2007 – 2012). Lieberman has taught at SIPA and in Columbia's Department of Political Science since 1994.
A focal point of Lieberman’s work at SIPA has been a reimagining of global public policy education – crafting a new category of intellectual endeavor and new styles of policy instruction for the 21st century. In 2011, Lieberman convened an international conference on the future of global public policy education to consider its core mission as a field, focusing on intellectual foundations, curriculum, and research.
Lieberman has been instrumental in the recruitment and appointment of internationally accomplished faculty to SIPA. They are the foremost scholars, researchers, and practitioners in their fields, coming from the highest levels of academic, government, nonprofit, nongovernment, and private-sector organizations. He also co-chaired the 2009 restructuring of SIPA’s curriculum, which added new public, nonprofit, and financial managerial courses.
Lieberman is the author of Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective (Princeton University Press, 2005), and the co-editor of Democratization in America: A Comparative-Historical Analysis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the British Journal of Political Science, Studies in American Political Development, as well as numerous other journals and edited collections.
His many awards include the American Political Science Association’s Leonard D. White Award, the Social Science History Association’s President’s Book Award, Harvard University Press’s Thomas J. Wilson Prize, Columbia University’s Lionel Trilling Award.
Lieberman has served as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and received fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and the American Philosophical Society.
Lieberman earned his BA from Yale University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University.
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