Fredrick C. Harris

Fredrick C. Harris is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center on African American Politics and Society at Columbia University. His research interests include 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 article “It Takes a Tragedy to Arouse Them: Collective Memory and Collective Action during the Civil Rights Movement,” published in Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Political Protest, received the Mary Parker Follet Award for best article by the American Political Science Association’s section on Politics and History. He is co-editor with Cathy Cohen of the Oxford University Press book series “Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities.”

Professor Harris’s most recent books are 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). The Price of the Ticket received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Non-Fiction. Professor Harris’s essays have appeared in Dissent, the London Review of Books, The New York Times’ Sunday Review, Souls, Society, and the Washington Post (Perspectives). Professor Harris has been 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.