Lee D. Baker, professor of cultural anthropology and dean of Trinity College at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has been selected to receive the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America by the Society for the Anthropology on North America.
The prize committee selected Dr. Baker for his scholarship’s theoretical focus on the history and politics of racial formation, and the role anthropology has played in that history and those politics.
Dr. Baker is the author of From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (University of California Press, 1998), Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture Duke University Press, 2010), and the editor of Life In America: Identity and Everyday Experience (Blackwell Publishing, 2003).
Dr. Baker is a graduate of Portland State University in Oregon and holds a Ph.D. from Temple University in Philadelphia.