Taeku Lee is Bae Family Professor of Government at Harvard University and President-Elect of the American Political Science Association. Lee has written extensively on racial politics, public opinion, identity and inequality, and democratic politics, broadly. He has a book forthcoming with Cambridge University Press on the centrality of race in American politics and is currently at work on two new books: one on how corporate scandals motivate voters to demand regulation and reform; another on Asian Americans as a diagnostic “miner’s canary” on the health of democracy in America.

Lee currently serves on the Boards of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the American National Election Studies; he previously served on the National Advisory Committee for the U.S. Census Bureau and the Board of the General Social Survey. He was Co-Principal Investigator of the National Asian American Survey and founding director of Asian American Decisions. Before returning to Harvard, Lee taught at UC-Berkeley for two decades and has previously been Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at Yale, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute, and Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Born in Masan, South Korea, Lee spent his childhood years in rural Malaysia, lower Manhattan, and suburban Michigan. In his free time, he is a crossword enthusiast, tennis junkie, and a Golden State Warriors and Tottenham Hotspur fanatic.