CV/Bio

Current CV: Lieberman_vita

Evan Lieberman is Professor of Political Science at MIT, and holds the Total Chair on Contemporary African Politics. He directs the Global Diversity Lab and MIT’s global experiential learning program, MISTI. Lieberman co-coordinates the Boston-Area Working Group on African Political-Economy (BWGAPE), and is a member of the E-GAP network. He serves on the editorial board of World Politics. He is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)’s, “Boundaries, Membership and Belonging” program.

Lieberman’s research investigates the relationship between identity and governance, particularly in democratic countries in the Global South. He has recently completed a book evaluating the experiment with multiracial democracy in South Africa and a study of the effects of providing information about race-based disparities in death rates on attitudes towards Covid-19 in the United States. In his current research, he is focused on the challenge of responding to the climate crisis in ethnically-divided societies; on the political value of dignity appeals; and the politics of democratic governance in South Africa. 

He also writes and teaches on research methods for comparative analysis, and teaches courses on Ethnic politics, Comparative State-Building, and African Democratic Development, including an online course, Democratic Development in Contemporary Africa.

Previously, Lieberman was a member of the faculty at Princeton University for 12 years, and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale University, and was an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town; and a fellow of the Democracy Scholars Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA from Princeton.

Lieberman is the author of three scholarly books, Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation (Cambridge 2003), Boundaries of Contagion: How Ethnic Politics Have Shaped Government Responses to AIDS (Princeton 2009), and Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa after Apartheid (Princeton 2022), as well as numerous scholarly articles. He received the 2014 David Collier mid-career achievement award.

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