Michelle Lee, PhD
Assistant Professor
Global Asian Studies
Contact
Building & Room:
1018 UH
Address:
601 S. Morgan St.
Email:
About
Michelle Lee is an Assistant Professor in Global Asian Studies and member of the Racialized Body Cluster at UIC. She specializes in Women of Color Feminisms, Asian American Studies, and Visual Culture Studies. Her research focuses on how Asian diasporic cultural producers take up aesthetic strategies that embrace the inhuman, monstrous, and abject. In particular, she explores how these strategies can challenge neoliberal calls for recognition and visibility, imagine posthuman relational networks, and nuance the ways we tell stories of intimate, everyday violences.
Her current book project, Unnatural Figura: Asiatic Femininity, Aesthetics, and Disfiguration, illuminates the ways Asian women are shaped by the discourse of disfigurement in U.S. cultural production. Analyzing visual arts, literature, and medical records, Unnatural Figura theorizes how the historical and ongoing disfiguration of Asian women—at once a tool of subjugation, a stubborn refusal to be wholly depicted, and a strategic performance by Asian diasporic cultural producers—connotes Asiatic femininity, revealing the ways race and gender are constructed through shifting proximities to inhumanness, eroticism, and physical harm.
Before joining UIC, Michelle was a Humanities in Learning and Leadership Series Postdoctoral Fellow at Case Western Reserve University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in American Studies. She has also worked at the National Public Housing Museum and Asheville Art Museum. Her work has appeared in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas, ArtAsiaPacific, and Women & Performance Journal. Michelle's work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
Education
Ph.D., American Studies, University of Minnesota
M.A., American Studies, Purdue University
B.A., Art History and Spanish, Macalester College