RSF Board of Trustees Update
Historian Earl Lewis (University of Michigan) joined the RSF board of trustees, and sociologist Jennifer Lee (Columbia University) became chair of the board at its November 2023 meeting.
Earl Lewis is the Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor of History, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Public Policy, and Director and Founder, Center for Social Solutions, at the University of Michigan. Lewis is a scholar in higher education, humanities scholarship and the role of race in American history and has authored several books on these subjects. He previously served as president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2013-2018). He has held faculty and administrative appointments at Michigan (1989–2004) and the University of California, Berkeley (1984–89). From 2004–2012, he served as Emory University’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies. A member of numerous boards of directors or trustees, Lewis was an Obama administration appointee to the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. He was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Joe Biden in March 2023. Lewis holds degrees from Concordia College-Moorhead, where he graduated with honors in history and psychology (1978), and the University of Minnesota (PhD, history, 1984). He is an RSF research grant recipient.
Jennifer Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia University. She is a former RSF visiting scholar and the co-author of two RSF books: The Asian American Achievement Paradox (with Min Zhou) and The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in Twenty-First Century America (with Frank D. Bean). She is also the author of Civility in the City (Harvard University Press) and co-editor of Asian American Youth (Routledge). She contributed to RSF volumes Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality, The Changing Face of World Cities, Immigration Research for a New Century, and The American People and is co-editor of recent RSF journal issue “Asian Americans and the Immigrant Integration Agenda.” Lee is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an elected fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and serves on the board of the Obama Presidency Oral History. She previously served as president of the Eastern Sociological Society. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago and was a Fulbright Scholar to Japan. Lee earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., each in sociology, from Columbia University. Lee is the first Asian American to hold the position of chair of the RSF board of trustees.