Dr. Jaime Sánchez, Jr.

I am a political historian of the twentieth-century United States with a focus on the intersection of identity and democracy. Currently, I am serving a three-year appointment as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (2022-25), after which I will transition to the role of Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley in Fall 2025. My current book project documents the genesis and transformation of what we now call "identity politics" across a century of presidential campaign history. More broadly, my published and ongoing research explores the institutional development of political parties, the contestation of racial and ethnic labels, and minoritized communities’ varied struggles for electoral representation in modern America. Before Harvard, I trained under preeminent American historians at the University of Chicago (BA) and Princeton University (PhD).

My research has garnered many honors and fellowships including Harvard University's William F. Milton Fund, the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation's Middleton Fellowship in Presidential Studies, and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. I am also an active alumnus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), having served two terms on the Mellon Graduate Initiatives advisory committee for the Social Science Research Council.

I am proud to have been the first person in my family to attend college. Navigating the uncharted waters of elite universities on my own as both an undergraduate and graduate student was a difficult journey—one that I hope to make easier for the next generation of young leaders and thinkers. My lived experience as a Mexican American scholar, in particular, has fortified my passion and advocacy for diversity and inclusion in higher education. Not only am I a first-generation college graduate, I am also a first-generation American, having learned English as a second language. Born and raised in Fresno, California, I am the proud son of Mexican immigrants and former farmworkers.