Steven W. Lewis is the C.V. Starr Transnational China Fellow in the China Studies Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. He is a professor in the practice for Transnational Asian Studies in the School of Humanities at Rice University, the associate director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies, which he helped found in 2008, and affiliated faculty in Rice’s Politics, Law and Social Thought program. Professor Lewis has researched the growth of a transnational Chinese middle class, the influence of advertisements in new public spaces in Chinese cities, the development of privatization experiments in China’s localities, and the reform of China’s energy policies, national oil companies and international energy relations. He received his doctorate in political science from Washington University in St. Louis. (Fall 2025)