Erika Lee Biography

Erika Lee is the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Regents Professor of History and Asian American Studies, and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is Vice President of the Organization of American Historians and the author of numerous books, including The Making of Asian America: A History, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America, and At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (co-authored with Judy Yung, Oxford University Press, 2010). (Simon & Schuster, 2015, 2nd ed., 2016, Chinese version, 2019). America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States, her most recent book. America for Americans was praised as "unflinching and compelling" by Carol Anderson (author of White Rage) and "important reading" by Ibram X. Kendi (author of How to Be an Antiracist). It also received the Richard Frisbie Honored Book Award for Nonfiction. Additionally, it was a nominee for the Minnesota Nonfiction Book Award and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, and Time, USA Today, and Ms. Magazine all included it on their best books lists. It was listed as one of the key novels illuminating the Trump era by the Washington Post, New York Times, and New York Public Library. The New Yorker and The Atlantic both included profiles and excerpts of it. Time and the Washington Post both published op-ed pieces based on the book. The 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the 2017 Dean's Medal and the Arthur Red Motley Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Liberal Arts, the 2016 Pioneer Award from OCA - Asian Pacific American Advocates, and the 2015 Immigrant Heritage Award from the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation are just a few of the numerous national and university fellowships and awards she has received for her research, teaching, and leadership. She is a prominent public intellectual who frequently appears in the media and has been invited to talk at colleges, historical societies, and community organizations both domestically and abroad. Lee has pioneered novel approaches to fusing immigration history with the digital humanities at the Immigration History Research Center. She founded and is the director of the Immigrant Stories Project, a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded initiative that works with recent immigrants and refugees to gather, archive, and share their experiences through a new multilingual digital storytelling platform.

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