Dr. Erika Lee is a Regents Professor, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor, the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History, and the Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She is also the author of four award-winning books in U.S. immigration and Asian American history, including At America’s Gates: Chinese immigration during the exclusion era, 1882-1943, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America, and The Making of Asian America: A History.

Lee received her B.A. in History and Cross-Cultural Studies from Tufts University in 1991, after which she went on to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley in 1993 and 1998 respectively. Now, she teaches a range of courses in history and Asian American Studies, including American Immigration History, Imagining Asian America, and Comparative Race and Ethnicity in US History.

In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Dr. Lee has taken on numerous leadership roles including serving as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serving as the Vice President of the Organization of American Historians. Her most recent book America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States has been lauded as “unflinching and powerful” (Carol Anderson) and “essential reading” (Ibram X. Kendi). It has received the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the Richard Frisbie Honored Book Award for Nonfiction. The book was also named a finalist for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award as well as the Minnesota Nonfiction Book Award.

Most recently, Dr. Lee has been an advocate for Asian-Americans during the time of COVID-19. In March, for example, she testified before Congress regarding the recent rise of anti-Asian hate crimes, violence, and discrimination. Lee also founded the Immigrants in COVID America Project, a digital collection of resources that document the impact of COVID-19 on American immigrants and refugees.

Dr. Jack Tchen is the Inaugural Clement A. Price Chair of Public History and Humanities and the Director of the Clement Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University, Newark. He characterizes his work as “public scholar[ship] pushing the envelope of conventional storytelling practices."

Tchen holds a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from New York University. He was the founding director of NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute and also helped found its Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, before joining Rutgers University in the fall of 2018. Dr. Tchen co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America, a community-based organization that seeks to create an ongoing dialogue about the history of the Chinese experience in America. He is also a founder of the Public History Project, a group of historians, artists, educators, and linguists working together to transform the colonial narrative dominating the history of the New York and Newark region.

In between curating exhibitions, developing archives, and starting up projects, he focuses on writing books. He is the author of several books on Chinese American history including Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown, Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion, and the award-winning New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882. In 2014, Dr. Tchen co-edited the book Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear. Reviews commend Tchen’s demonstration of the longevity and pervasiveness of the “yellow peril” trope in western culture, the origins of which he traces to medieval Europe.

In the past few years, he has been involved with the podcast “No Politics at the Dinner Table!”, Haunted Files, an online exhibit on Eugenics Record Office, Hacking the University 2020 Price Institute Gathering, and the Climate Clock Countdown. He co-founded the New York Newark Public History Project in 2018. Most recently, he was appointed to the New York City Panel on Climate Change.