Biography

Anthony S. Chen is Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, where he teaches courses on political sociology, historical sociology, and public policy. His research examines selected topics in public policy and American political development.

Chen is author of The Fifth Freedom (Princeton, forthcoming), a political and legislative history of the postwar struggle against job discrimination. A new project with Margaret Weir at Berkeley sets out to identify and account for different patterns in the political development of state health care reform. In collaboration with Lisa M. Stulberg at NYU, he has begun work on a book that chronicles the birth and evolution of affirmative action in undergraduate admissions. His research has appeared or will appear in the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of American History, and Studies in American Political Development.

After graduating from the public schools of Alief, Texas, Chen received a BA from Rice University and a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Soros fellow. From 2005-7, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Berkeley/UCSF. In the latter half of 2008, he will be in residence at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, where plans to develop a new project on deregulation and the politics of economic risk since Nixon.