Julia H Lee

Picture of Julia H Lee
Professor, Asian American Studies
School of Humanities
Ph.D., UCLA, 2005, English
B.A., Amherst College, 1995, English
University of California, Irvine
3305 Humanities Gateway
Mail Code: 6900
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Asian American literature and culture, Ethnic American literature and culture, early twentieth-century African American literature, American railroad, Transcontinental Railroad, Chinese exclusion, Angel Island poems, Maxine Hong Kingston
Research Abstract
I am currently working on two projects. The first focuses on an emerging sub-genre of contemporary Asian American literature that I am tentatively calling the Asian American neo-frontier narrative. These works portray the stories of Asian American or Asian diasporic characters as they move across the spaces of the nineteenth-century American West. I argue that these narratives index the difficulty – if not impossibility – of an Asian American past that coheres with history as it is legitimized by institutionalized structures of memorialization such as archives.

The second project is a monograph tentatively titled "Coughing on Asians during COVID-19." In it, I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound representational and discursive impact on Asian Americans and Asian diasporans, simultaneously illuminating and altering key aspects of how Asian racial difference is imagined in this country. Through readings of a wide range of cultural productions, this study makes the case that narratives of Asian racial difference in the era of COVID-19 intermingle with longstanding anxieties regarding Asians as carriers of contagion and a more recent preoccupation with the Asian body’s technological and mechanistic proficiency. In other words, I argue that the pandemic adumbrated a process of racialization that relies upon imagining the Asian figure as embodying a series of misalignments/contradictions: 1) that Asians are malicious agents of infection as well as premodern lumps of diseased flesh, and 2) that Asians are leaders in bio-technological innovation as well as highly precise machines, both a “disposable object of decadence” as well as a “disposable human labor.”
Short Biography
Julia H. Lee is professor of Asian American Studies at UC Irvine. She teaches courses on Asian American literature, race and urban space, Asian American communities, and Asian American popular culture.
Publications
“BTS and the Labor of Techno-Orientalism,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, forthcoming 2024.
“Asian American Settlers, the Neo-frontier Narrative, and the Problem of History,” Amerasia Journal (2024): 1-16. doi:10.1080/00447471.2024.2405420.
The Racial Railroad, New York University Press, 2022
“Teaching the Transnational in Asian North American Novels,” Teaching Asian North American Texts, edited by Jennifer Ho and Jenny Willis, Options for Teaching Series, MLA Press, 2022, pp. 264-274.
Asian American Literature in Transition, Vol. 1 (1850-1930), co-edited with Josephine Lee, Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Introduction to Asian American Literature in Transition, Vol. 1 (1850-1930), co-authored with Josephine Lee. Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 1-14.
“Island In Between: The Politics of Place in the Poetry of Angel Island,” Asian American Literature in Transition, Vol. 1 (1850-1930), edited by Josephine Lee and Julia H. Lee, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 102-118.
“Transpacific Diasporas,” The Cambridge Companion to 21st Century American Fiction, edited by Joshua Miller, Oxford University Press, 2021, pp. 142-156.
"Asian American Realisms," The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism, edited by Keith Newlin, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 223-231.
“Comparative African American and Asian American Literary Studies,” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, edited by Josephine Lee, Anita Mannur, and Cathy Schlund-Vials, 2019. Available at http://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-836
Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
“Model Maternity: Amy Chua and Asian American Motherhood.” Global Asian American Popular Cultures. Shilpa Davé, LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha Oren, ed. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 61-73.
“The Railroad as Message in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Frank Chin’s ‘Riding the Rails with Chickencoop Slim.’” The Journal of Asian American Studies 18.3 (2015): 265-287.
“The Chinaman’s Crime: Race, Memory, and the Railroad in Willa Cather’s ‘The Affair at Grover Station.’” Western American Literature 49.2 (2014): 147-170.
“Rethinking Asian American Literary Studies: A Review Essay of Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War, Caroline Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary American Fiction, and Eleanor Ty’s Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 59.1 (Spring 2013): 182-192.
Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937. New York: New York University Press, October 2011.
“Estrangement on a Train: Race and Narratives of American Identity,” ELH 75.2 (2008): 345-365.
“The Capitalist and Imperialist Critique in H. T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands.” Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature. Ed. Floyd Cheung and Keith Lawrence. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2005. 80-97.
Last updated
10/24/2024