Dr. Steven Lee

Biography

Steven S. Lee is an Associate Professor and C.K. Cho Chair at the Center for Korean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests encompass American literature, comparative ethnic studies, and Soviet post-Soviet studies, with a specific focus on Northeast Asia during the interwar years. He is the author of "Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures World Revolution" (Columbia University Press, 2015), which won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. Lee served as co-editor of "Comintern Aesthetics" (University of Toronto Press, 2020), which won the René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. He studied at Amherst College and participated in Stanford's MTL Program, where he began his academic career as a Fulbright scholar investigating Soviet Korean culture in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Lee currently chairs the Berkeley Center for Korean Studies and has held various positions, including interim chair of the Asian American Research Center and a courtesy appointment in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His ongoing research focuses on a book manuscript exploring leftist and rightist ideologies in Northeast Asia surrounding World War II and their imprints on Asian American and Anglophone writing.

Research Interests