Robert C. Lieberman is Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. His research interests include American political development, public policy and political institutions, race and politics, and social welfare policy and the welfare state.

Lieberman is the author of Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective (Princeton University Press, 2005). His first book, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 1998), won numerous prizes, including the Lionel Trilling Award (for the best book by a Columbia faculty member), the Social Science History Association’s President’s Book Award, and the Thomas J. Wilson Prize from Harvard University Press. His work has appeared in numerous journals including the American Political Science Review, Studies in American Political Development, British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and Social Science History, as well as several edited collections. He is also a co-editor of Democratization in America: The United States as a Democratizing Nation (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press).

Lieberman received his BA from Yale University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and has received research fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the National Endowment for the Humanities.