He is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy.
[4] He is a labor historian who has written also about 20th-century American political economy, including the automotive industry and Wal-Mart.
Lichtenstein received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in 1966 and his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974.
He received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to undertake research at Wayne State University in 1990.
He was elected to membership in the Society of American Historians in 2007 and became MacArthur Foundation Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara in 2010.