Alan Brinkley

Alan Brinkley (born June 2, 1949) is an American historian who has taught for over twenty years at Columbia University. He is Allan Nevins Professor of History and, from 2003 to 2009, was University Provost.

Brinkley was born in Washington, D.C. He is the son of David Brinkley, a long-time television newscaster at NBC and ABC. Brinkley was an undergraduate at Princeton and received his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1979.

Brinkley’s scholarship has focused mostly on the period of the Great Depression and World War II, although his work has moved into other areas as well. Among his books are Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1983), which won the National Book Award; "The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War" (1995); "Liberalism and its Discontents" (1998); and "The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century" (2010), which won the Ambassador Book Prize and the Sperber Prize, as well as being a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the author of two short biographies: "Franklin D. Roosevelt" (2009) and "John F. Kennedy" (2012). He is also the author of two American history textbooks, "American History" and "The Unfinished Nation", which are widely used in colleges and AP high school classes.

His essay “The Problem of American Conservatism,” published in the American Historical Review in 1994, helped bring the growing conservative movement to the attention of scholars.

He is one of three American historians to have been both Harmsworth Professor at Oxford (in 1998-99) and Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge (in 2011-2012). He is an honorary fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. He received the Jerome Levenson Teaching Prize in 1982 at Harvard University, where Brinkley taught for seven years; and the Great Teacher Award at Columbia in 2003. He is the chair of the board of the Century Foundation in New York, and he is the chair of the board of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. He was also a trustee of Oxford University Press from 2009 to 2012 and a trustee of the Dalton School.

He lives in New York with his wife, Evangeline Morphos and his daughter, Elly.