Dr. Vera Leigh Fennell

Vera Leigh Fennell is an Associate Professor of Political Science and an associated member of the Global Studies Program at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has lived and studied in both Taiwan, the Republic of China and in the People's Republic of China. Vera graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in East Asian Studies. Her dissertation, "Just a Stitch in the Political Fabric", analyzed the role of gender in the formation of small private businesses in Beijing under Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. She was a faculty member in the Political Science Department at Colorado College and received a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Minnesota's Herbert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, where she began researching the Cold War era relationship between the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Tsetung and African nationalists seeking to establish black-rules states and African-Americans seeking full legal and social incorporation in the American body-politic. Her book on this subject, Reading Black through Red: Blackness as China's Cold War Era 'Soft Power,' will be published by Oxford University Press.