Lynn Stephen is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She joined CSWS as the Women in the Northwest Initiative Director starting in fall 2006 and now also serves as Associate Director for Program Development.. Her research has centered on the intersection of culture and politics. Born in Chicago, Illinois she has a particular interest in the ways that political identities articulate with ethnicity, gender, class, and nationalism in relation to local, regional, and national histories, cultural politics, and systems of governance in Latin America. During the past eight years she has added the dimension of migration to her research. Her newest book is titled Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon (March, 2007, Duke University Press). Her three most recent books are Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca (2005), Zapata Lives!: Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (2002) and Perspectives on Las Américas: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation (2003), co-edited with Matt Gutmann, Felix Matos Rodríguez, and Pat Zavella. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, The Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University and research grants from the National Science Foundation, The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Inter-American Foundation. She has a strong commitment to collaborative research and in projects that produce findings that are accessible to the wider public. She has most recently collaborated with Pineros y Campesinos del Nordoeste (PCUN), CAUSA ( Oregon immigrant rights coalition), Rural Organizing Project, Juventud FACETA, and twelve weaving cooperatives from Teotitlán del Valle in her work. Her most recent research focuses on identity formation and the political and civic participation among Mexican immigrant youth.