 Afterwards he taught at Columbia University and Yale University before joining the history department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, where he has served widely on university and professional committees, was executive director of the France-Berkeley Fund(1994-2002) and founding director of the University of California’s Paris Study Center and its constituent international programs.Since 2013, he has been Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Field major at Berkeley.His father is the noted anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins.