Theresa Mah, PhD'99 (History), discusses her time at UChicago as a PhD student in the History Department, her academic career, and her transition into politics and current role as Illinois State Representative for the 24th House District.
Theresa Mah is the Illinois State Representative for the 24th House District (previously the 2nd District priot to 2021). In 2016 she made history as the first Asian American elected to the Illinois General Assembly. Prior to her election, Dr. Mah worked with Illinois Governor Pat Quinn's administration on efforts to improve diversity and minority representation in state government.
Rep. Mah earned her BA from Berkeley and her PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 1999. After graduating, she was an Assistant Professor at Bowling Green State University until she returned to Chicago to pursue politics, advocacy, and activism.
Kelly Pollock: Hello and welcome to Dialogo, a podcast of the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. In each episode, we interview an alum of the social science graduate program here at the University of Chicago, exploring their career path and reflecting on their time on campus. I am Kelly Pollock, Dean of Students for the Division of the Social Sciences.
Paul Poast: And I'm Paul Poast, Deputy Dean in the social science division here at the University of Chicago.
Kelly Pollock: Today's guest is Theresa Mah who earned her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1999. Theresa is now the representative for the Illinois 24th House District. Hello, Theresa.
Theresa Mah: Hello, I'm so happy to be with you.
Kelly Pollock: Yes, we're thrilled to have you with us as well. So, maybe to start, you could tell us a little bit about how you came to be at the University of Chicago. I think you grew up in California so I am curious what brought you from California to the University of Chicago to study history.
Theresa Mah: Yeah. Well, I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and it wasn't until a little bit late in my undergraduate career that I decided to apply to PhD programs. And so, I did a lot of research into best programs around the country, I applied to them and, lo and behold, I got an offer from the University of Chicago. I had never been to Illinois, I had never really been to the Midwest at all and I had applied without having visited campus and so it was a surprise. It was one of the graduate programs on my list of maybe eight or nine institutions and it was a pretty good offer, it was one that I couldn't refuse, it was the best offer I got.
And so, I had to actually ask the department to allow me to visit before I made up my mind and so they paid for a trip for me to come during prospective student day, I guess, for the graduate students. I think it was sometime in May and, when I came, it was pretty pleasant, the weather was nice, I met interesting people, I was impressed by the campus and so that made me feel a lot better about moving halfway across the country to a place I'd never been before and that's how I ended up at the University of Chicago.
Paul Poast: The one question I love to ask is what did you write your dissertation on or what did you write it on or what do you recall that you wrote it on?
Theresa Mah: I came to study US history and, the year that I arrived, it was I think very shortly after my advisor Professor Tom Holt had won a MacArthur Genius Award. He specialized in African-American history and the history of race and racism, I was interested in that topic as well. And because I moved from California to Chicago and noticed some distinct differences in my environment, one of the things that I noticed right away was the way in which the city was segregated and that it was perhaps more segregated than the place that I had grown up in but, whether it was more or less segregated and whether that segregation was something that only fell across Black and white lines or if it affected other racialized groups, that was a question that I had.
And so, I spent a lot of my time exploring the history of race and racism and racial segregation during my time in graduate school and I ended up writing about the cultural history of housing segregation and what it meant for our conception of ourselves as Americans. And I looked beyond the Midwest and explored the dynamics that happened in the country more broadly between the 1920s and 1968 with the passage of the Fair Housing Act. And I was interested in why practices of racial segregation continued even after there were legal rulings by the Supreme Court, for example, deeming housing covenants unenforceable but there were practices that seemed to be embedded in our culture somehow and I wanted to explore that. So, that's what I did in my dissertation.
Kelly Pollock: So, it would be a natural question to ask, how do you go from a history PhD to working in politics? But I think this question starts to answer itself from what you're saying here, it sounds like you had an interest in public policy from the time that you were in graduate school from the time that you were doing your dissertation research.
Theresa Mah: Yeah, and really it came from understanding racial inequality as a structural problem, that it wasn't just individual prejudice that we were dealing with in our society, it was inequalities that were built into our institutions and part of that was from how those structures were upheld through public policy. And so, after I finished my dissertation, I got various jobs, some in history departments, some in Asian-American studies and, ultimately, a tenure track job in ethnic studies. Part of my objective in my classes was to talk about how these structures developed in our history, in our nation's history and, again, it was always trying to emphasize that these inequalities were not individual, it wasn't just a particular bias that one person had but these systems were built in an unequal way and it was along racial lines as well as class or gender and that led me to really understand how things in culture and society could change. You had to understand how these inequalities were constructed and developed before you could really understand how to dismantle them.
And so, after a few years of teaching and really trying to drill in this lesson to my students, I had the opportunity to work in a community and work with a community-based organization and tried to get resources for members of the community. And so, when you're working in a community, you have to deal with the elected officials and the decision-makers that would help make those decisions about whether you deserved resources or whether you could get a library built or a bus line and it just became apparent that it helps to have a seat at the table where you could be one of the decision-makers. And so, in short, that's how it happened because, after I transitioned out of academia, I worked for nonprofit organizations that did advocacy and community organizing and it just became more and more clear that the best way to have a voice and to really be at the center of those decisions that get made and determine people's quality of life or the level of resources that they get, you have to find a way to get a meaningful seat at the table and be empowered to make those decisions.
And so, that ultimately led me to run for office in my community but there was a lot more involved with that as well. I was involved in other people's campaigns for many years before I actually ran myself and there were reasons for that as well.
Paul Poast: If you don't mind, I'd love to be able to explore that a little bit more. Even when you were in the PhD program, did you have a sense of academia may not be the end-career goal here? That you had a sense that, because of the subject matter you were studying, maybe you always had an interest or had in the back of your mind I might want to move into the policy space or move into politics directly or was it something that it was just, as you went along, opportunities presented themselves and then it started to become apparent that maybe this is something I want to move into?
Theresa Mah: Probably closer to the latter. When I was in grad school, I was completely absorbed in everything that it takes to stay in graduate school and complete that dissertation. I really didn't have time to get involved in the community, I was pretty focused on trying to build a career in academia and I think that's the culture a lot of times at the University of Chicago that's drilled into you that that's your end goal. I don't think I realized when I was applying to graduate school that it would be so all-encompassing. I don't think I even had an idea that it would take more than five years or four or five years because I got a fellowship that was for four years and I didn't know anybody who had gone to graduate school or gotten a PhD, other than my professors as an undergraduate, but I didn't know anyone personally, I'm the first person in my family to graduate from college.
And so, the only reason it even entered my head to apply to a PhD program was because one of my professors when I was an undergraduate made that suggestion to me because I'd done well in his class and he said, "Well, have you ever thought of going for a PhD? Going on to graduate school?" And frankly, I hadn't ever thought of that, it was a completely alien concept. But once he introduced a concept to me, I was intrigued and I did some research into what it would take and what the good programs were and I took a fifth year as an undergraduate and did an honors thesis so that I could be more prepared to apply and so it was a complete surprise even going down that career path. So, I was so absorbed in surviving in that program as someone who was from another part of the country dropped in this alien environment that I was able to adapt to eventually but there was a bit of culture shock from many different dimensions.
I didn't have time to get involved in the community at all but I think the nature of what I was studying from when I was an undergraduate through graduate school reinforced the sense that there are different ways to get involved, there are different ways to change the environment in which you live to make change, that being engaged with our democracy and the political process was something of value. So, I think that ... I know this is an interview about my experience at the University of Chicago but I would say that the seeds were planted when I was an undergraduate and, especially at UC Berkeley, where I was exposed to the history of student activism and the free speech movement and anti-war protests in that part of the country in particular. And then even when I was graduating from undergrad, that was the beginning of the Iraq war and there was quite a bit of protest that I was exposed to at that time.
And so, it was already part of my understanding from before I got to graduate school but, because of what I studied, that awareness continued but I didn't have any time personally to get involved just because it just takes so much complete the program, to survive the program and to get a job in academia. And then, once you're in academia trying to get tenure and get good teaching evaluations and everything that it takes, I was completely in a different world until ... After I left my tenure track position in 2006 and moved back to Illinois, that was truly when my involvement really ramped up and I got involved in politics joining various campaigns, getting my feet wet in the engagement in that world because ... This was 2006 and I had decided to leave my tenure track job partly because I didn't want to live in Ohio for the rest of my life.
Paul Poast: Just for our listeners, you were at Bowling Green State University, correct?
Theresa Mah: Correct, I was in the ethnic studies department. And having grown up in metropolitan area and then having gone to a graduate school in another really diverse city and metropolitan area, I just wasn't that comfortable in small town middle America. And so, I made my way back to Illinois, I was back at the University of Chicago at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture and was able to have much more work-life balance. I wasn't on the tenure track anymore but I still got to teach and I still got to be engaged in subject matter that was interesting to me and that I had a commitment to. I also noticed that, in Illinois, there weren't any Asian-Americans in public office in any visible capacity, maybe at the hyper-local level park district board or school board but there were no Asian-Americans in the General Assembly, there were no members of Congress and no one on city council.
And so, having grown up in California, that seemed obviously wrong to me, that it wasn't normal, it wasn't what things should be. And so, that year, Tammy Duckworth who is currently our state senator, one of our two senators, she was running for Congress for the first time in 2006 and I had friends who were involved and they were looking for volunteers. It was exciting to get involved in her campaign to try to elect the first Asian-American member of Congress from Illinois and so I delved into that and just felt an obligation to do something about a situation that I didn't think was quite right. I really thought that there were Asian-Americans in Illinois and we should have some kind of political representation and you can't just complain about something, you have to do something about it.
So, I became a volunteer on her campaign, even though she was campaigning in a different county altogether, I would gather people who were also interested in volunteering and I would drive them out to DuPage and knock on doors or make phone calls. And it was possible because I didn't have to focus on getting tenure anymore and, like I said, I was in a position that allowed for more community involvement and work-life balance so I jumped into a completely different world of grassroots politics. And even though that campaign, unfortunately, wasn't successful, she lost by a slim margin but, the very next year, we had municipal elections here in Chicago and there was a woman who wanted to run for city council and become the first Asian-American elected to Chicago City Council. And so, I jumped into her campaign and wanted to make a difference by helping her get elected and she was running in the 50th Ward and I was working in Hyde Park but I was still eager to help in whatever way I could.
One of my former students from Northwestern was her field director and he convinced me to get more involved and so there were weeks when I would drive from Hyde Park all the way up to Rogers Park, West Rogers Park, West Ridge and knock on doors or join meetings for leadership team or whatever it was, there was a senior advisory group. And so, it just seems astounding to me now that I was so committed to this that I would drive, sometimes during rush hour for an hour, up to the other end of the city but that's how committed I was and that's how involved I got but I wasn't thinking at the time that I would run even back then. So, that was 10 years before I actually ran my own campaign. So, I wasn't thinking, oh, I'm doing this so I can get enough experience because I'm going to run one day but it was purely about what I could do at the time to increase representation for my community in some body of government that was in Illinois where we saw this need.
And yeah, so it wasn't until much later after being involved in a number of different campaigns, some of them successful, some of them not, that I learned enough and felt like, "Okay, well, I've got enough experience myself to try it, to make a run," and that's when I decided in 2015 that I would start my campaign. But it took a lot of experience in the run-up to that and then also working for a couple of years for Governor Quinn, our former governor, I guess getting a taste for what it's like working for an elected official where you're empowered to be the representative for a community because I was Governor Quinn's ... I was a senior policy advisor and director of Asian-American outreach so I performed that function in state government where I reached out to the Asian-American community on behalf of the Governor to listen to what the needs were and to try to take action to remedy whatever issues were on people's minds, what issues affected the community.
And so, I had a taste for what it would be like were I to be in the state legislature. By that time, the seed had been planted a few years before and I was thinking that maybe I would run at some point. But while I was working for the Governor and doing a job that I loved, I wasn't thinking of doing it then. But in 2014, when Quinn lost his re-election, I was contemplating my next steps and that's when I finally made the decision in 2015.
Kelly Pollock: So, what is the day-to-day? I'm sure it's different every day but what's the job of a state legislator? I think it's something that seems more mysterious to people sometimes, they think about US Congress, they might have some sense of what City Hall does. But what does a state legislator do? What are the kinds of legislation that you're working on? And I'm curious if there are times that, having gone through a PhD program, learned that research skills come in handy.
Theresa Mah: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I love that question because I love sharing with people what I do because I love my job. So, officially, it's supposed to be a part-time job and it's defined that way because I have some colleagues who may work in other professions like insurance or real estate or they might be attorneys and that's permitted. But I'm a full-time legislator and, in my experience, it's as if I have five jobs rolled in one. So, in addition to going down to Springfield and working on legislation, I have to maintain a district office. And if you're not aware, I represent a district entirely within the city of Chicago that encompasses several predominantly immigrant neighborhoods. So, my district includes Chinatown, Bridgeport, Pilsen, McKinley Park, Brighton Park and back of the yards or parts of those neighborhoods. So, it's a predominantly immigrant working-class community and there's a large percentage of those who are English learners so they're not necessarily proficient in English.
And so, my district office becomes constituent service office, I have two full-time staff who are fully bilingual, one in Spanish and English and one in Chinese and English and that's also multiple dialects of Chinese. And I've always had multiple bilingual staff because I have the type of district where people who are not necessarily proficient in English, they're limited English proficient, that's the, I guess, official, the government terminology for them, they want to come in and talk to someone that they'll know they can communicate with. There's a lot of uncertainty, if they call, will the person who answers the phone be able to understand them or help them and so we get a lot of walk-in customers or constituents I should ... We get a lot of walk-in constituents. There's a lot of hand-holding, helping people fill out forms or apply to programs, a lot of frontline work that maybe some of my colleagues in suburban areas where they're more affluent or better educated wouldn't need these services.
So, we help our constituents navigate the bureaucracy that is state government, we problem solve for them, we partner with other elected officials on things like job fairs and we've had a monthly food distribution that we work on with the Greater Chicago Food Depository because there's food insecurity and issues that require our attention beyond what we already do. So, that customer service aspect of our district office, that's one aspect of my job, I'm fortunate to have the help of great staff who are from the community and speak the languages that are spoken in the district and they're able to really help people with a lot of day-to-day needs, applying for a senior parking pass or Medicaid or whatever it is that the constituents might need.
And then I go down to Springfield, in a given year, our legislative session runs from the middle of January until May 31st and, during that period, there are two main aspects of our job. We have to pass a budget and, in the last few years, it's been deciding on how we spend our $54 billion revenues which come from income tax, sales tax, registration fees for various things, fees and fines. So, we have to balance this giant checkbook and then decide how we spend the money and it's always a process, a multi-month long process where we're negotiating back and forth between our colleagues, between the agencies that need the money for the running of their operations, the nonprofit organizations that we work with to provide state services. Some years, we have a shortage of revenues and the projections may say that we won't be able to cover all the expenses that we want to spend the money on so we have to really go back and forth with the Governor's office, with our colleagues, with the Senate and come up with the document that everyone can agree on.
And so, you can imagine that that takes a lot of back and forth and negotiation and, in the meantime, during all of those months, you have advocates coming to Springfield to express their desire for more money and for funding for their programs and they're streaming in and out of our offices and assembling in the Capitol Rotunda and having their rallies. So, that's one part of the work in Springfield and then the other part is the legislation that we may sponsor as a chief sponsor, so the legislation that we carry or the bills that our colleagues may be proposing. On the one hand, we're quarterbacking the pieces of legislation that we want to pass, our brainchild's or we may be working with advocates on various proposals but we have to take that from the concept through filing, through committee hearings, through negotiating with various stakeholders and then getting our colleagues to support the bill and voting for it on the floor and then we start the whole process over again in the other chamber.
But as this is happening, we may be keeping an eye on a bill or multiple bills that we're working on or our colleagues' bills, we have to evaluate each and every one of them that comes before us with an eye towards whether it's good for the communities that we represent. So, there are multiple aspects to the legislative portion of our jobs as well, we have to pay attention to what our colleagues are proposing because it might be good for Southern Illinois but not good for our constituents. And so, we're always having to be cognizant and making decisions that we can take back to our constituents and say, "Hey, we worked in your best interest, we listened to your voices when we made these decisions, we learned all about X, Y and Z topic and made the best decision based on what we could gather." And there's a lot of learning involved and that's one of the reasons why I really like the job because I think of myself as a lifelong learner. And each legislative session that starts, there are a slew of topics, things to learn about, whether it's a topic that is being addressed by a colleague's bill or a topic that I want to delve into and make a difference on.
So, the discipline that I developed as a graduate student, as a PhD student, I think serves me well because I understand how to navigate that complexity because there's no black and white approach to any issue, there's always multiple dimensions and different contexts and complex systems. And so, I think, having gone to graduate school and gotten my PhD and having studied a topic backwards and forward so that I could write a dissertation about it, it trained me to understand the complexity of everything and the fact that there are multiple sides and multiple dimensions to every issue and subtleties that you have to really consider before making any kind of decision on it. When we pass legislation, it affects 53 million ... Sorry, not 53 million, sorry. When we pass legislation, it affects 13 million people across the state and so I see that as a tremendous responsibility that we all have as legislators because we're affecting people's lives in large ways and small ways depending on where they are in relation to a given issue.
But I ran and I serve in office because I was interested in doing what I could to improve people's lives and so you have to take that approach to every decision we make because we're affecting people and I want to make sure that it's not in a negative way whatsoever. So, I'm proud to have that background, to have gone through a tremendously rigorous graduate school experience. And even though I have a job that doesn't have that as a requirement, I have colleagues with very different educational backgrounds, there's a range of educational attainment and experience. A PhD is certainly not necessary or required, there are only, I think, in the House, there might just be two of us now with doctoral level education. There's always only been a handful among the 177 members of both chambers, I think there's never been more than two or three at a time at any given time.
So, I don't regret having that experience though because I think it helps me every single day be a more thoughtful legislator and I think that our General Assembly has increased in quality and education in the last few years. Since I joined the General Assembly eight and a half years ago, there has been an increase in the quality of my colleagues especially in terms of educational attainment and work experience.
Paul Poast: The way that I am thinking about what you're saying is, as a political science professor and so someone who has studied a lot of policymakers especially on the foreign policy side of things, it's always been talked about that there's some policymakers that are policy wonks. They want to study the details, they need to know the details, they want to hear all the angles to it and there's others who are just that's not what they do. It's not that they ... They bring other talents to it, they bring other perspectives to it but it sounds like you bring a little bit more of that first type. You want to be able to know the details and your training as an academic represents that mindset to it that I want to know, I want to be able to analyze this and understand the details and so forth. So, that was what was going through my mind as you were sharing this.
Theresa Mah: But in an empathetic way, right? I think the word I was searching for, I have more colleagues who are able to be more empathetic because of their life experience but also their career paths. We have more social workers, we have more people who intentionally studied public policy in order to improve people's lives. My seatmate Aaron Ortiz is a college and career counsellor and we have some educators from different levels of the educational system. So, it's a huge difference from 10 or 20 years ago where or when we had more people who were from politics itself, from the political machines, the political organizations that funnelled people into these positions. It was sometimes a reward for loyalty or a certain foot soldier was in the right place at the right time and there was no requirement for any particular level of education or experience.
And this was typical in Illinois, especially Chicago area, we're known for that kind of government but I think that we've moved quite a bit away from that. And I serve in a legislature that is extremely diverse, there's almost a majority of women. The sub caucuses based on race and ethnicity so the Black Caucus, Latino Caucus and now the Asian-American Legislative Caucus, together, we are a majority of legislature and my colleagues are increasingly coming from backgrounds where they've been committed to improving the lives of their constituents even before they got to our body of government. And so, it just makes me proud to be a part of something that is increasingly more thoughtful and empathetic and that we're actually helping people with the decisions that we make.
Kelly Pollock: Theresa, would you like to tell our listeners how they can follow you on social media?
Paul Poast: Or how they can find you in general.
Kelly Pollock: Or in general.
Paul Poast: Yes, or in general. How can they find you?
Theresa Mah: I do have a pretty active Facebook page that is mostly directed at my constituents, it's State Rep. Theresa Mah. That page gets updated every day with helpful information for my constituents and record of activities, my activities in Springfield or in the district. I also highlight small businesses that are in my district. So, yeah, that's State Rep. Theresa Mah on Facebook. Also, I have an Instagram that is public and it does include some things from my private Facebook page, it's a little mix of everything. So, people who are interested in a mix of my public and my professional life and personal life that's semi-public can follow me on Instagram and that's just my name. I'm currently deciding what to do about the other platforms that I may or may not continue to be on.
I also have a reptheresamah.com website but, again, that's me in my office capacity. And then my campaign, theresamah.com, there is a website for that, I don't know that it's all that updated.
Paul Poast: Well, this was terrific. Thank you for sharing your stories with us today, I think you've hit all the angles from your time at UChicago, what you wrote your dissertation on, how that led to your immediate post-Chicago path to what you're doing now. So, we very much appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today.
Theresa Mah: Yeah. And if I may add one thing, one of your last questions had to do with, I guess, results of my work. So, there was an article this week in the Chicago Tribune about a judge awarding some plaintiffs an $80,000 judgment because they filed a lawsuit based on a bill that I had passed. And so, that gave me a feeling of satisfaction knowing that the things we do in the legislature does make a difference in people's lives. The bill that I passed was the Immigrant Tenants Protection Act and so, some of my work, I don't know if I mentioned before, the priorities that I tend to focus on in my legislative work a lot of them are because of the population that I represent. And so, I tend to focus on public education, workforce development, immigrant rights, healthcare access, consumer protection, those kinds of topics.
And so, this bill was meant to protect tenants from being threatened where a landlord might threaten them, say that they're going to call ICE or report them because of their actual perceived immigration status. And so, there was a lawsuit based on that bill and I think that the news couldn't have come at a better time because I think that something like that is especially relevant today because of the climate that we're in where immigrants are being targeted and disparaged. And so, my hope is that, with this news, there's more awareness of what one shouldn't be doing and what rights tenants have regardless of their immigration status. And so, that was just a nice highlight this week that gave me a good feeling about the work that we do in the legislature and it's a nice reminder that we can make a difference.
Kelly Pollock: Theresa, thank you so much for speaking with us.
Theresa Mah: Thank you. Thanks for having me, it was quite a pleasure.