Ken Jowitt is the Pres and Maurine Hotchkis Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jowitt specializes in the study of comparative politics, American foreign policy, and postcommunist countries. He is particularly interested in studying types of anti-Western ideologies that might appear in the near future and, in that context, is working on Frontiers, Barricades and Boundaries, a book dealing with the changes in international political geography and the challenges to American and Western institutions.

Among his recent publications is The New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (University of California Press, 1992). He has also written "Really Imaginary Socialism" (East European Constitutional Review, spring/summer 1997), "In Praise of the Ordinary: An Essay on Democracy," published in Adam Michnik's Letters from Freedom (University of California Press, 1998), "Russia Disconnected" (Irish Slavonic Studies 19 [1998]), "Challenging the Correct Line" (East European Politics and Society, fall 1998), and "Ethnicity: Nice, Nasty, Nihilistic," in Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions, ed. Daniel Chirot and Martin E. P. Seligman (American Psychological Association, 2001).

In 1997 he delivered the presidential address at Whitman College. In 1998 Jowitt delivered the Princeton Lectures, and was the Jean Monnet Visiting Scholar at the European University in Florence. He has spoken at the Commonwealth Club, the World Presidents Organization, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. In addition, he appears occasionally on the CNBC program Hardball.

Jowitt has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1968. In 1983 he won the University Distinguished Teaching Award and was dean of undergraduate studies from 1983 to 1986. In 1995, the year he was named Robson Professor of Political Science, he also received the Distinguished Teaching Award for the Division of Social Sciences.

Jowitt received his bachelor's degree from Columbia College in 1962 and his master's degree and doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963 and 1970, respectively. The University of California Press published his doctoral thesis, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, in 1971.