Dr. Anthony W. Marx

Dr. Anthony W. Marx, formerly President of Amherst College and a distinguished political scientist, became The New York Public Library's President and CEO, effective July 1, 2011. In his first year at NYPL, he has led a planning process for increased educational programming in the branches, services to researchers, ensuring public access to electronic books, and planning for renovations and provision for a state-of-the-art central branch library.

As Amherst's President, Dr. Marx earned wide recognition for his passionate promotion of accessibility to higher education for lower-income students. Prior to joining Amherst in 2003, Dr. Marx served as professor and director of undergraduate studies of political science at Columbia University, where he spearheaded a number of secondary school initiatives. In the 1980s, he helped found Khanya College, a South African secondary school that prepared more than 1,000 black students for university.

Dr. Marx is the highly regarded author of more than a dozen scholarly articles and three books: Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990 (Oxford University Press, 1992); Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa and Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2003). Making Race and Nation received the American Political Science Association's 1999 Ralph J. Bunche Award for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism, and the American Sociological Association's 2000 Barrington Moore Prize for comparative-historical sociology. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997, in addition to fellowships from the United States Institute of Peace, the National Humanities Center, the Howard Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

A native New Yorker, Dr. Marx attended P.S. 98 and the Bronx High School of Science. He then attended Wesleyan and Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in 1981. He received his M.P.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1986, then earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton in 1987 and 1990.

Contact information:

Press Release On The Appointment of Dr. Anthony Marx As NYPL President