Taeku Lee is Bae Family Professor of Government at Harvard University and president-elect of the American Political Science Association. He is an expert on racial politics, public opinion, political engagement, identity and inequality, and democratic politics broadly. Lee’s writings include the award-winning Mobilizing Public Opinion: Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes in the Civil Rights Era (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Why Americans Don’t Join the Party: Race, Immigration, and the Failure (of Political Parties) to Engage the Electorate (Princeton University Press, 2011). His coauthored Race and Inequality in American Politics: An Imperfect Union is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press and Lee is finishing a coauthored book on corporate scandals and democratic renewal.
Lee was previously on the faculty at UC Berkeley for two decades and has held honorary or visiting appointments at Yale, the European University Institute (EUI), Oxford, and Brookings. He has served on the National Advisory Committee for the U.S. Census Bureau and the governing boards of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American National Election Studies, and the General Social Survey. Lee regularly advises political campaigns, civil rights organizations, foundations, and NGOs.
Born off an army base in Masan, South Korea, Lee spent his childhood years in rural Malaysia, lower Manhattan, and suburban Michigan. In his free time, Lee is a crossword enthusiast, tennis junkie, and die-hard Michigan Wolverines, Golden State Warriors, and Tottenham Hotspurs fan.
What can Asian Americans tell us about polarization and backsliding in the U.S. today? Lee’s project, “Reimagining America: What the Asian American Experience Can Tell Us about the Health of Democracy in the United States,” will examine four key areas of governance — voting, education, public health, and policing — and leverage the Asian American experience to pinpoint where our politics have veered away from our democratic ideals and how they can be reconciled anew.
May 2024
