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Alan Brinkley is the twentieth Provost and the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University.

A native of Washington, D.C., he was educated at Princeton and at Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in history in 1979. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1991, he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Among his publications are Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (Knopf, 1982), which won the 1983 National Book Award; The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (Knopf, 1995); and Liberalism and Its Discontents (Harvard, 1998). He is also the author of two widely used college American history textbooks, American History: A Survey, now in its twelfth edition; and The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, now in its fifth edition. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared widely in scholarly journals and in such other publications as the New York Times Book Review and Magazine; the New York Review of Books; the New Republic; the New Yorker; the Times Literary Supplement; the London Review of Books; Time; Newsweek; Harper's; and the Atlantic.

He has had visiting appointments at Princeton, New York University, the University of Torino, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and Oxford University, where he was the 1998–99 Harmsworth Professor of American History. He was the recipient of the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize at Harvard in 1986 and of the Great Teacher Award at Columbia in 2003. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the National Humanities Center, the Media Studies Center, and the Russell Sage Foundation.

He chairs the board of trustees of the Century Foundation and serves on the board of the National Humanities Center. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.