Erika Lee

Introduction

Erika Lee, Ph.D., is an award-winning American historian, director of the Immigration History Research Center, Regents Professor, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, and the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. 

Lee’s scholarly specialties include migration, race and ethnicity, xenophobia, immigration law and public policy, Asian Americans, and transnational U.S. history.

At the Immigration History Research Center, Lee has helped to pioneer new ways of merging immigration history with the digital humanities. She launched and oversees the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Immigrant Stories Project, which works with recent immigrants and refugees to collect, preserve, and share their experiences with a new multilingual digital story-telling website and archive. 

Lee also founded and co-organized the #ImmigrationSyllabus project, a digital educational resource offering historical perspectives to contemporary immigration debates.