By Jeanhee Hong
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 29, 2002

Pei-te Lien, one of the nation’s leading scholars on Asian American studies, is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah.

She began teaching at the University in 1995 and along with Political Science courses like Asian American Politics and American Racial and Ethnic Politics, regularly teaches Ethnic Studies courses, such as Contemporary Asian American Issues. Lien is particularly interested in analyzing the political behavior of Asian Americans and has written two significant books and several scholarly articles on the topic.

Lien’s first book, The Political Participation of Asian Americans: Voting Behavior in Southern California, was published by Garland Publishing in 1997 and her second, The Making of Asian America Through Political Participation was published in 2001 by Temple University Press. This second endeavor is a more ambitious effort that examines the development of multiethnic political communities in the United States and looks at how race, ethnicity and transnationalism have helped build America’s complex electorate.

Lien not only traces the making of Asian American political activism and participation, but also compares it with the experience of other minority groups, including African Americans, Latinos and American Indians. The book serves to illustrate how active and diverse the Asian American community truly is and the steps it is taking to make inroads into the broader American political and electoral landscape.

In addition to these published manuscripts, Lien has published articles in professional journals like Political Research Quarterly, Political Behavior and Asian American Policy Review. She is also a contributor to the World Journal, a Chinese language newspaper widely circulated in the United States.

Aside from teaching and research, Lien is also active in professional activities, and is the founding co-chair of the Asian Pacific American Caucus – a related group of the American Political Science Association. At the 2001 Annual Meeting of the APSA, for instance, Lien, with Taeku Lee of Harvard University, presented a paper entitled “The Political Significance of Ethnic and Panethnic.”

Also in 2001, Professors Lien and Lee, along with M. Margaret Conway of the University of Florida and Janelle Wong of the University of Southern California, issued a summary report of the pilot National Asian American Political Survey, the first ever multi-city, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual survey of Asians in the United States. The paper resulting from this report, entitled “The Mosaic of Asian American Politics: Preliminary Results from the Five-City Post-Election Survey” was presented at the 2001 annual meetings of both the Midwest Political Science Association and the Association for Asian American Studies. Lien served as Principal Investigator of the survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program.