Sucheng Chan

Sucheng Chan (; born 1941) is a Chinese-American author, historian, scholar, and professor. She established the first full-fledged autonomous Department of Asian American Studies at a major U.S. research university and she was the first Asian American woman in the University of California system to hold the title of provost.
Chan was born in Shanghai, China in 1941. Her family moved to Hong Kong in 1949, to Malaysia in 1950, and to the US in 1957. She received a bachelor's degree at Swarthmore College (Economics, 1963), a master's degree at the University of Hawaii (Asian Studies, 1965), and a Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley (Political Science, 1973). She married Mark Juergensmeyer, a fellow graduate student at UC Berkeley, who became a widely published scholar in the fields of religion and politics, global studies, and terrorism. She taught at four University of California campuses: Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and San Diego (the last as a visiting professor). Now retired from the University of California, Santa Barbara because of the effects of post-polio syndrome, she donated much of her personal papers to the Immigration History Research Center Archives, part of the University of Minnesota Libraries, and is in a multiyear process of donating her large personal library to the University of California, Merced, which still has room in its library for additional books. Her personal library includes books in Asian American Studies, Latino/a Studies, African American Studies, global studies, global migrations, sociological theories, U.S. immigration history, California history, and studies about every country in East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia—all of which are topics she has studied, researched, or written about. She was a Guggenheim Fellowship laureate in 1988.