Charles Hirschman is Boeing International Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1972. He taught at Duke University from 1972 to 1981, at Cornell University from 1981 to 1987, and has been at the University of Washington since 1987. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on demography, immigration and ethnicity, and Southeast Asia, Hirschman conducts research on immigration and ethnicity in United States and on social change in Southeast Asia. He currently directs the University of Washington-Beyond High School project, a longitudinal study of educational attainment and the early life course of young adults. He is the author of Ethnic and Social Stratification in Peninsular Malaysia (1975) and is the co-editor of Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America (1992) and The Handbook of International Migration (1999). He has also written more than one hundred journal articles and book chapters.

He has been elected President of the Population Association of America (2005), Chair of Section K (Social, Economic, and Political Sciences) of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (2004-05), and is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been a visiting fellow at the University of Malaya (1984), Australian National University (1985), the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1993-94), the Russell Sage Foundation (1998-99) and the Population Reference Bureau (2005-06). He also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a rural village in Malaysia from 1965 to 1967.