Lee D. Baker

Lee D. Baker

AAA Executive Board TreasurerProfessor of Cultural Anthropology and African & African American Studies at Duke University

My Biography

Lee D. Baker is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He received his B.S. from Portland State University and doctorate in anthropology from Temple University. He has been a resident fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Johns Hopkins’s Institute for Global Studies, The University of Ghana-Legon, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Humanities Center. His books include From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (1998), Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience (2003), and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (2010). Although he focuses on the history of anthropology, he has published numerous articles on such wide ranging subjects as socio-linguistics to race and democracy. Baker is also the recipient of Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Teaching Award. He served as Dean of Academic Affairs from 2008-2016.

Lee received his B.S. from Portland State University and his doctorate in anthropology from Temple University. He has been a resident fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Johns Hopkins’s Institute for Global Studies, The University of Ghana-Legon, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Humanities Center. His books include From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (1998), Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience (2003), and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (2010).

Although he focuses on the history of anthropology, he has published numerous articles on a wide range of subjects from socio-linguistics to race and democracy. Baker also received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Teaching Award and the American Anthropological Association’s award for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America. From 2008-2016, he served as Duke’s Dean of Academic Affairs.