Lee D. Baker
| Lee D. Baker | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Lee D. Baker 1966 (age 50–51) San Diego County, California, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Anthropology, Africana studies, African American Studies |
| Institutions | Duke University |
| Thesis | Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (1994) |
Lee D. Baker is an American cultural anthropologist, author, and Duke University faculty member. His current titles at Duke are Professor of Cultural Anthropology, African & African American Studies, and Sociology as well as Dean of Academic Affairs and Associate Vice Provost. He taught at Columbia University from 1997 to 2000. Baker has authored two books and more than sixty academic articles, reviews, and chapters related to cultural anthropology, among other fields.
Baker was born in San Diego, California, and was raised in Corvallis, Oregon. In his teen years, Baker began to “study and learn about the black experience” as he grappled with his own sense of racial identity. Portland at the time was a site of crack cocaine addiction and gang violence, particularly prevalent in the black community. During an exchange program in Australia, Baker was alarmed to observe similar problems affecting Aboriginal Australians, who were “nothing like the black folks [he] knew in the United States.” Baker realized that despite their differences, Aboriginal Australians and African Americans had a significant commonality: they were blacks in a white-dominated democracy. Full of questions about society and culture, Baker decided to study anthropology.
Baker attended Portland State University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology and a certificate in Black Studies in 1989. He went on to Temple University in Philadelphia to pursue graduate research. In Philadelphia, Baker found himself within a different community than he was used to in Portland. “It was good,” he recalls, “to be around a lot of really hardworking, smart, attractive people who wanted to make a difference. I was not a minority, in a sense; I was just among a lot of different people trying the same thing.” At Temple, his doctoral advisor was Thomas C. Patterson, who supported Baker's focus on the history of anthropology. Baker completed his thesis, Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954, in 1994.
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