Jennifer Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia University. An award-winning author and experienced public commentator, she has been uniquely successful in placing the study of Asian Americans centrally in the discipline. She is author or co-author of four-award winning books, including Asian American Achievement Paradox which garnered five national book awards. In it, she and her co-author dispel the cultural fallacy that Asian Americans excel in education because they value education more than other groups. Her work has also focused on immigrant entrepreneurship and ethnic conflict, intermarriage and multiracial identification, the battle over affirmative action, and the surge in anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, which she presented to the Biden-Harris COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. In her most recent project, Lee shifts our attention to the workplace, where Asian Americans lag behind all racial and ethnic groups in promotion to managerial and executive ranks in spite of their education, work experience, and job performance. Presumed competent, Asian Americans are not presumed fit to lead.

Crystal Parikh is Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis and English at New York University. She specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary transnational American literature and culture, with a focus on comparative race and ethnic studies, as well as ethical and political theory and gender and sexuality studies. In addition to numerous essays and articles, Professor Parikh has published Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which was the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Award for Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Literature. She is also the author of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture (Fordham University Press, 2009), which was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary Studies. She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (2019), and she co-edited with Daniel Y. Kim, The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (2015). Professor Parikh is currently serving as the Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.