Tim Soutphommasane

In 2019, he was appointed Professor of Practice in Sociology and Political Theory at the University of Sydney to teach human rights related theory.

His The Virtuous Citizen: Patriotism in a Multicultural Society was published in 2012 and Don't Go Back To Where You Came From: Why Multiculturalism Works, published the next year, won the NSW Premier's Literary Award in the 'Community Relations Commission Award' section.

He was appointed to the Council for Multicultural Australia in August 2011.

From 2010 to 2012 he was a Lecturer in Australian Studies and a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Australian Studies of Monash University. He was one of six chief investigators on an Australian Research Council Linkage project studying the history of ANZAC Day.

He was also co-editor (with Nick Dyrenfurth) of All That's Left: What Labor Should Stand For (New South Books, 2010).

Soutphommasane's first book Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-Building for Australian Progressives was published in 2009. Loosely based on research undertaken toward his doctoral thesis, the book argues that people with progressive politics must re-engage with ideas of patriotism and national identity, which Soutphommasane claims were surrendered to the right during the Prime Ministership of John Howard.

Soutphommasane joined the Australian Labor Party in 1998, aged 15. He later worked on the speechwriting staff of then New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, and in late 2007 he returned from Oxford to work as a research officer in the office of Kevin Rudd during that year's federal election campaign.

His family was resettled by the Family Reunion Program of the Australian Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs to Sydney's south-western suburbs in 1985, where he was raised. He was educated at Hurlstone Agricultural High School.

Thinethavone "Tim" Soutphommasane (/s uː t ˈ p ɒ m ə s ɑː n / soot-POM -ə-sahn; born 1982) is an Australian academic, social commentator and former public servant. He was Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission from 2013 to 2018. He has previously been a political staffer for Bob Carr and Kevin Rudd, a columnist with The Age and The Australian newspapers, a lecturer at Sydney and Monash Universities, and a research fellow with the Per Capita think tank. He is a member of the board of the National Australia Day Council, and an ex officio member of the Council for Multicultural Australia.

Soutphommasane was born in Montpellier, France in 1982 to Chinese and Lao parents who had fled Laos as refugees in 1975.