Fredrick Cornelius Harris

Fredrick C. Harris is the Class of 1933 Professor of Political Science and former Dean of Faculty in the Social Sciences at Columbia University. He also serves as Director of the Center on African American Politics and Society.

Harris’s research interests are primarily in American politics with a focus on race and politics, political participation, social movements, religion and politics, political development, and African-American politics. His publications include Something Within: Religion in African American Political Activism, which was awarded the V.O. Key Book Award by the Southern Political Science Association, the Best Book Award by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Best Book Award by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

He is also the co-author of Countervailing Forces in African-American Civic Activism, 1973-1994, which received the W.E.B. DuBois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association. His other books include The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics (Oxford University Press, 2012), and, with Robert Lieberman, Beyond Discrimination: Racial Inequality in a Post-Racist Era (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2013). 

Harris’s essays have appeared in Dissent, the London Review of Books, The New York Times, Society, Souls, Transition, and the Washington Post.

He has served as Vice President of the American Political Science Association. A non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Professor Harris has also served as a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and a Visiting Professor at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris.