Charles King

Charles King is an American academic and author, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University. Born in 1967, he received his degrees from Oxford University and the University of Virginia, and has written widely on ethnic politics, the history of the Black Sea region, Eastern Europe, and anthropology. His book Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (2019) tells the story of Franz Boas and his students—Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and others—who overturned the scientific racism of their era and established the modern understanding that race is a social construct rather than a biological fact. The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2020 and the Lionel Gelber Prize, and was widely praised for its narrative skill, its intellectual depth, and its urgent contemporary relevance. King's other books include Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (2011) and The Black Sea: A History (2004). He lives in Washington, D.C.