Kevin R. Johnson
University of California Davis, Davis, CA
Kevin R. Johnson is a Distinguished Professor of Law, Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law. Johnson also has an appointment as Professor of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis. He joined the UC Davis law faculty in 1989 and was named Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in 1998. Johnson then served as Dean from 2008 to 2024. He has taught a wide array of classes, including immigration law, civil procedure, complex litigation, Latinos and Latinas and the law, and Critical Race Theory. In 1993, he was the recipient of the law school's Distinguished Teaching Award.
Johnson has published extensively on immigration law and civil rights. Published in 1999, his book How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity was nominated for the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Johnson’s book, Immigration Law and the US-Mexico Border (2011), received the Latino Literacy Now’s International Latino Book Awards – Best Reference Book. He is co-author of two editions of Immigration Law and Social Justice (2d ed. 2022). Johnson blogs at ImmigrationProf.
A regular participant in national and international conferences, Johnson has also held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools and is the recipient of an array of honors and awards. He is quoted regularly by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other national and international news outlets.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review, Johnson earned an A.B. in economics from UC Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked as an attorney at the international law firm of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe. Johnson served from 1996 to 2022 on the board of directors of Legal Services of Northern California and as President of the board. From 2006 to 2011, he served on the board of directors of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the leading Mexican-American civil rights organization in the United States.
Johnson is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Association of American Law Schools Minority Groups Section Clyde Ferguson Award (2004), the Hispanic National Bar Association Law Professor of the Year award (2006), the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Scholar of the Year award (2008), the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) Romero Vive Award (2012), and the Centro Legal de la Raza Outstanding Achievements in the Law Award (2015). In 2003, he was elected to the American Law Institute.
Fred Lee
University of Connecticut, Storrs
Fred Lee received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles and his B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is jointly appointed between Political Science and Asian/Asian American Studies, and holds affiliations with Africana Studies, American Studies, and Philosophy. He works across the fields of contemporary political theory, U.S. political development, Asian/Asian American cultural studies, and comparative ethnic studies.
His book is Extraordinary Racial Politics: Four Events in the Informal Constitution of the United States (Temple, 2018). Here he argues that extraordinary events—including 1830s-1840s Southeastern Amerindian removals, the Japanese internment, the civil rights movement, and 1960s-1970s empowerment movements—have repeatedly reshaped “the informal U.S. constitution.” More generally, Lee argues that extraordinary racial politics have the power to remake the norms of and redirect the trajectories of everyday racial politics.
Lee is currently pursuing two streams of research. The first is on Asian American political thinkers such as Claire Kim and Grace Lee Boggs. This project aims to establish Asian American political thought as a critical perspective and academic field. The second is on artists in East Asian speculative fiction such Bong Joon-ho and Liu Cixin. The basic aim here is to explore East Asian speculative fiction as a genre of political thought with a transcontinental (Asian/American) bent.
Lee in other works has explored U.S. racial incorporation after the 1960s-1970s, the project of radical democracy, and the relationship of neoliberalism and authoritarianism.
Seema Sohi
University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO
Seema Sohi is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her book,
Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford University Press, 2014) examines the radical anticolonial politics of South Asian intellectuals and migrant workers based in North America during the early twentieth century as well as the inter-imperial efforts of the U.S. and British states to repress them. A history of radicalism and antiradicalism, this project also looks at the racial formations of South Asians through the lens of antiradicalism during the early years of South Asian migration to the United States. She has also published essays and articles in the
Journal of American History,
Sikh Formations, and an anthology titled,
The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (New York University Press, 2013). She is currently writing a history of the climate justice movement.