Professor Nicholas B. Dirks is a widely respected and highly influential historian and anthropologist, and a prominent leader in higher education.
In June 2020, Professor Dirks assumed leadership of The New York Academy of Sciences as President and Chief Executive Officer. In 2012, Professor Dirks was named as the 10th Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and served in that role until July of 2017. He launched major initiatives in undergraduate education and research collaborations in areas such as neuroscience and genomics. He oversaw the establishment of a new division of Data Science and led a series of bold global projects, including the creation of the Tsinghua Berkeley Shenzhen Institute and a global alliance with the
University of Cambridge, the National University of Singapore, and several other institutions.
Before joining Berkeley, Professor Dirks was the Executive Vice President for the Arts and Sciences and Dean of the faculty at Columbia University. Prior to his appointment at Columbia, for 10 years he was a Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Before that, he taught Asian history and civilization at the California Institute of Technology.
Professor Dirks received his BA from Wesleyan University, and his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. He has published four major books, edited three others, and written numerous essays and articles. He has held prestigious fellowships and scholarships and received several scholarly honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Foundation residential fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Lionel Trilling Award for his book, Castes of Mind. His most recent book, City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on numerous national and international bodies while receiving honorary degrees in Beijing, China and Madras, India. He is a Senior Member at the Council on Foreign Relations.
