Younghyun Lee

Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I will be on the job market in the 2026-2027 academic year.

I study how immigrants and minorities come to belong politically in contemporary European democracies: when they are recognized as legitimate members of the political community, and when they are pushed to its margins. My work sits at the intersection of comparative political behavior, political psychology, and identity politics, and has been published in Political Science Research and Methods and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

My dissertation, Beyond Contact: How Interactions with Natives Shape Immigrant Political Integration, takes a minority-centered approach to intergroup contact. Drawing on survey data, interviews, and original survey experiments, I investigate how interactions with natives shape immigrants' own political integration in the context of anti-immigrant sentiment in Belgium and Germany.

I was a doctoral visiting fellow at the Immigration Research Initiative (IRI) in Fall 2024 and at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) in May 2025. I hold an M.A. in Political Science and a B.A. in French Literature and International Studies, both from Korea University.