Hamilton College President Eugene M. Tobin has announced the appointment of Associate Professor of Government Philip Klinkner to the James S. Sherman Chair at Hamilton. Appointments to faculty chairs are made by the president, acting on the recommendation of Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty David Paris.
"Phil Klinkner has been an outstanding member of the campus community since joining the faculty in 1995," said Tobin. "As a teacher, a scholar and a public intellectual, he represents the highest ideals of the Hamilton professoriate.
The Sherman Chair is awarded to a member of the government department whose teaching, scholarship and community service bring credit to the college. It is named for James S. Sherman, a Hamilton College graduate who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and later vice president of the United States under William Howard Taft. The Sherman Chair was held previously by Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty David Paris.
Klinkner received his Ph.D. from Yale University and bachelor's degree from Lake Forest College. In 1990-1991, he was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and in 1995, he received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the American Political Science Association.
Klinkner is an expert on American politics, including political parties and elections, race relations, Congress, and the Presidency, and he is the former director of the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center at Hamilton. His books include The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956-1993 (Yale University Press, 1994), and Midterm: The 1994 Elections in Perspective (Westview Press, 1996). Most recently, he co-authored The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of America's Commitment to Racial Equality (University of Chicago Press, 1999), which received the 2000 Horace Mann Bond Book Award from Harvard University's Afro-American Studies Department and W.E.B. DuBois Institute.
