Lee, Rachel C.
Associate Professor
Humanities 234
Tel: 310.825.7515
Fax: 310.267.4339
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Education

Interests

Rachel C. Lee, Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at UCLA, specializes in Asian American literature, performance culture, and studies of gender and sexuality.  She is the author of The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton University Press, 1999), and co-editor of the volume Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace (Routledge University Press, 2003).  Lee has held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, and a UC Humanities Research Institute.  Her current project, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America, examines Asian bodies as they overlap with various discourses on technology, transnationalism, cyberspace, and sexuality, in a variety of genres such as stand-up comedy, dance, new media/digital technology, and literature.  Lee is currently Associate Director, Center for the Study of Women, University of California, Los Angeles and heading a multi-year research project, “Life (Un)Ltd,” addressing the question of what impact recent developments in the biosciences, biotechnology, and in clinical practice have had on feminist studies, especially those theorizing the circulation of population data and biomaterials in relation to race and (neo)colonialism.  For more information, please go to http://www.csw.ucla.edu/people/advisory-committee/rachel-lee

Selected Works

“Haptics, Mobile Handhelds, and other ‘Novel’ Devices: The Tactile Unconscious of Reading across Old and New Media.”  CTheory (Jan. 2012) at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=697

“‘Where’s My Parade?’ Margaret Cho and the Asian American Body in Space.”  TDR: The Drama Review 48.2 (Summer 2004): 108-132. (PDF)

“Notes from the (non)Field: Theorizing and Teaching ‘Women of Color.’”  Meridians 1.1 (Fall 2000): 85-109.  Rpt. In Women's Studies on Its Own, ed. Robyn Wiegman, Duke University Press, 2002. 82-105.

“Asian Americans’ Performing Blackface, Blacks’ Performing Yellowface: Costly Performances or Coalitional Enactments.”  Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas. Eds. Dominique Marcais, Mark Niemeyer, Bernard Vincent, Cathy Waegner. Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag C., 2002. 147 – 158.

“Asian American Cultural Production in Asian-Pacific Perspective.”  boundary 2 26.2 (summer 1999): 231-254.

Recent Classes Taught

Undergraduate:

Los Angeles: Layers and Landscapes
Tactility (senior seminar)
Gross Anatomy: Representing Through Body Parts
War, Patriotism, and Asian American Cultural Acts of Good Citizenship
Specialized Studies in 20^th Century American Literature: Theaters of Race
Feminist Theory

Graduate:

The Body Eclectic: Special Topics in Asian American Critical Theory
Racial Feeling, Post-racial Biopolitics
Visceral, Voluble, and Virtual: Femiqueer Corporealities
Feminist Knowledge Production: Biopolitics and the Woman-Sex Question