Skowronek Named to Endowed Professorship at Yale

Stephen Skowronek, an expert on American politics whose scholarship has focused on the nation’s presidents and the institution of the presidency, has been named the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science by vote of the Yale Corporation, the governing body of Yale University.

Skowronek, a member of the Yale faculty since 1986, is author of “The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush,” published in 1993, and its second edition, “The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton,” published in 1997. The first edition won two awards from the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1994: the J. David Greenstone Prize for best book in politics and history and the Richard E. Neustadt Prize for best book on the presidency.

Skowronek is also the author of “Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920” and of numerous articles on the presidency and on American political and institutional development. He is currently at work on a volume examining American political development.

Skowronek earned his A.B. from Oberlin College and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University. He taught at Cornell and the University of California at Los Angeles before coming to Yale, where he has held a joint appointment since 1993 at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He was director of undergraduate studies in the political science department 1989-94.

An invited lecturer at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Europe, Skowronek held the French-American Chair in American Civilization at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris 1996-97. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 1985-86. He is an academic adviser and lead consultant for the public television series “The Presidents in Their Own Words,” which will air in the year 2000.

Skowronek is the founder and managing editor of the biannual journal Studies in American Political Development, and serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals. He is a member of APSA, the Social Science History Association and the American Historical Association.