Alexander Keyssar is an American historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

, and the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

.

Life

He graduated from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 with a PhD in the History of American Civilization. He taught at Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

, Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

.

He chaired the Social Science Research Council

Social Science Research Council

The Social Science Research Council is a U.S.-based independent nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing research in the social sciences and related disciplines...

's National Research Commission on Voting and Elections.
His current research interests include election reform, the history of democracies, and the history of poverty.

He writes for the Huffington Post.

Awards

• 1987 Frederick Jackson Turner Award
  Frederick Jackson Turner Award
  The Frederick Jackson Turner Award, is given each year by the Organization of American Historians for an author's first book on American history.It was started in 1959, by Mississippi Valley Historical Association, as the Prize Studies Award....
  
  ; Philip Taft Labor History Prize for Out of Work
• 2001 Beveridge Prize for "The Right to Vote"; Eugene Genovese Prize for "The Right to Vote"
• 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
• 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist for The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
• 2001 Parkman Prize, Finalist
• 2005 Fulbright Specialists University of Lisbon

Works

• "The Electoral College Flunks", The New York Review of Books, Volume 52, Number 5 · March 24, 2005

(2000) revised 2009

Co-author

• Inventing America, a text integrating the history of technology and science into the mainstream of American history
• Comparative and International Working-Class History. In 2004/5

External links