Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education
Lee D. Baker, PhD, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African & African American Studies, oversees Duke’s Office of Undergraduate Education.
He 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 (University of California Press, 1998), Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience (Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2003), and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Duke Press, 2010).
Although Baker 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 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 to 2016, he served as the Dean of Academic Affairs at Duke’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. Baker is a member of the Duke University Bass Society of Fellows and held the Mrs. A. Hehmeyer Bass Professorship from 2015 to 2020.
Education
- Ph.D., Temple University
- B.S., Portland State University