Stanley Resor
New Haven, Conn. - Jacob S. Hacker, who will return to teaching at Yale as the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science, is an expert on the politics and character of U.S. social policy and on American political institutions.
Hacker, who taught from 2002 to 2007 at Yale before leaving for the University of California-Berkeley, has been a leading national voice on social policy, health care reform and economic insecurity in the United States. He has focused much of his research on the institutions of social protection. Other areas of research interest include the politics of U.S. social policy, American political development and the comparative political economy of the welfare state. He is the author of "The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement - and How You Can Fight Back," "Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy" (with Paul Pierson), "The Divided Welfare State: The Battle Over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States" and "The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security," which won the Louis Brownlow Book Award of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Hacker is also the author of "Health Care for America," a proposal for guaranteed, affordable healthcare for all Americans sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute and he co-edited "Health at Risk: America's Ailing Health System - and How To Heal It." His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in numerous popular and scholarly publications, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New Republic and the American Political Science Review.
A graduate of Harvard University, Hacker earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 2000. He received several major awards for his dissertation on healthcare reform. He joined the faculty as the Peter Strauss Family Assistant Professor and was appointed the Peter Strauss Family Associate Professor in 2005. A year later, he became a full professor. He was also a residential fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Hacker is a fellow of the New America Foundation and is a former guest scholar and research fellow at the Brookings Institution. He co-chaired the National Academy of Social Insurance's 2007 conference and has served as a member of the American Political Science Association's Task Force on Inequality, among other professional activities. He chairs a Social Science Research Council project on the "privatization of risk" and is completing two books.