Mark Brilliant

About

Mark Brilliant was formerly the William C. Bark National Fellow at the Hoover Institution from 2021-2022.

Brilliant is an associate professor in the Department of History and Program in American Studies at the University of California–Berkeley. His first book, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978, won the William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History and received honorable mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. His current book in progress is entitled Gilded State: California and the Origins of America’s New Gilded Age. It explores the historical roots of contemporary California’s curious confluence of high-tech innovation and Democratic Party domination on the one hand, and extreme income polarization on the other.