Academic Profile

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Desmond King, DLitt FBA

Professorial Fellow
Andrew W Mellon Professor of American Government

King is the author of 13 books, 9 coedited books and numerous articles and chapters. Amongst other findings, King's research has demonstrated the significance of deliberate segregation and racialization in the US federal government (Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government, OUP 1995/2007 2n ed), how immigration and racial ideology combined in the United States (Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Making of the Diverse Democracy, Harvard 2000), the group bases of American identity (The Liberty of Strangers, OUP 2007), the malign influence of eugenics on North American social policy (with Randell Hansen, Sterilized by the State Cambridge UP 2013), how the Covid pandemic had disparate ethnic-racial impacts (with Gerda Hooijer, "The Racialized Pandemic" Perspectives on Politics 2022), and how a dichotomy between protect and repair policy alliances now drives the politics of civil rights (with Rogers M Smith, America's New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair, Chicago 2024). His new paper on "American Political Violence" (Government and Opposition 2024) explains why and with what consequences legitimate violence outside state control functions in the American polity. King's op-eds have appeared variously in the New York TimesLe Monde Diplomatique and the Financial Times. He is an elected fellow of the Royal Irish Academy, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Desmond King, DLitt FBA I
Attribution:

David Fisher (Fisher Studios)

Publications

Publications include:

"American Political Violence." Based on the 2023 Leonard Schapiro Lecture.  Government and Opposition. 2024 vol 57.

"The Racialized Pandemic: Wave One Covid 19 and the reproduction of Global North inequalities," Gerda Hooijer and Desmond King, Perspectives on Politics June 2022, 20: 507-527.

Fed Power: How Finance Wins. With Larry Jacobs. OUP, 2021.

European States in Crisis. Desmond King & Patrick Le Gales, coeds. OUP, 2017.

“Forceful federalism against racial inequality.”  Government and Opposition, 52 (April 2017):  356-282. [See Washington Post Monkey Cage op-ed, “Worried about the decline in democracy?”  11 April 2017.]