Ira Katznelson (Ph.D., Cambridge University, 1969) is an Americanist whose work has straddled comparative politics and political theory, as well a political and social history. He returned in the Fall 1994 to Columbia, where he had been an assistant and associate professor from 1969-1974. In the interim, he taught at the University of Chicago, chairing its department of political science from 1979 to 1982, and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he was Dean from 1983-1989. His most recent books are When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (Norton 2005) and Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (Columbia University Press 2003).