 Since 1997 he has been the Fred M. Seed Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, and since 1999 he has been Professor of Anthropology, both at Brown University.Since 2012, when he retired from teaching, he has been The George Hazard Crooker University Professor, emeritus

Lieberman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in psychology in 1987.In 1990, Lieberman gave the Nijmegen Lectures of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics under the title 'The evolution of language and cognition'.