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Jennifer Dorothy Lee

Associate Professor

Contact

Bio

Education: PhD, 2014, New York University; MA, 2003, University of London; BA, 2000, Columbia University. 

Jennifer Dorothy Lee (she/her) studies art and cultural practices in modern and contemporary China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Lee's research and teaching areas encompass social history, aesthetic theory, and transnational perspectives. Trained in comparative literature, Lee brings literary frames and methodologies to work with visual and material objects.

Lee's first book, Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978–1985 (University of California Press, 2024) offers a sustained study of aesthetic theory, art, and subjectivity redefined in the fleeting historical moment bridging the Mao era with Dengist reforms. Among Lee’s contributions are a fresh approach to perceiving the preconditions for contemporary Chinese art, as well as illuminating for the first time the fusion of abstraction and scientism in the art history of 20th-century China.

Lee's next book, Diasporic Longing, will explore belonging and displacement as well as music from Asia to Europe among her family of musicians. Immersed in her family’s wartime migration and dispersal amid 20th-century global upheaval, Lee weaves biography, storytelling, fragments of poetry, as well as musical notation and performance to revisit the meanings of diaspora across three continents. 

On leave for Spring 2026

Awards

Institute of Chinese Studies Fellowship 2026, Chinese University of Hong Kong; William Bronson Mitchell and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Enhancement Fund 2025-2026; Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar Grant 2025-2026; FirstGen Grant, University of California Press; Rockefeller Archive Center Research Stipend; Visiting Scholar, New York University; Publication Grant, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation; Faculty of the Year, SAIC; Getty Visiting Lectureship, University of Chicago; SAIC Diversity Infusion Grant; SAIC Team-Teaching Award; International Center for Critical Theory Dissertation Fellowship; Sun Yat-sen University Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship; NYU Henry M. MacCracken Fellowship; Critical Language Scholarship; Arts and Humanities Research Board Grant (UK).

Publications

Journal of Asian Studies (accepted); positions: asia critique; Screen Bodies; Art Journal; Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art; Frontiers of Literary Studies in China; Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. Catalog Essay: Centre Pompidou (in preparation), Holzwarth Publications, The Research House for Asian Art and Co-Prosperity Sphere, Chicago, IL. Translation: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, Critical Asian Studies, Guggenheim Museum. 

Recent Advisees

Tessie Shi Tang (MA Art History 2025), “Imagined Feminisms On Screen: New Feminist Narratives in post-2010s Chinese Cinema"
Tamane Takehara (MA Art History 2025), “Hi Red Center’s Cleaning Event: Securing and Containing the Postwar Disabled Body” 
Alice Yasi Xie (MA Art History 2025), “Crafting Chinese Bodies in WWII New York: Lin Yutang, Si-Lan Chen, Eitaro Ishigaki”
Erica Cheung (Dual-Degree MA Arts Administration + Art History 2024), “How the West is Spun: Of Railroad Builders, Singing Cowboys, and Smalltown Nostalgics”
Yasmine Ghazipour (MA Art History 2024), “Visualizing Iranian Socialism: The Art, Stories, and Legacy of the Fadai, Mojahedin, and Tudeh”
Mengran Liu (2023), “Root-Searching Nonstop: On the Revival of Chinese Folk Art in Contemporary Art Practices from the New Folk Art to Art Rural Reconstructions”
Chenghan Gao (2021), “Guohua as a Transnational Concept in Global Context (1911-1945)”
Lynette Shen (2021), “A Body in Places: Performative Monumentality in Eiko Otake’s Spectral Performance”
Gabrielle Christiansen (2020), "Make a Better Day: Historicizing the Charity Single in Samson Young’s Songs for Disaster Relief"
Minh Nguyen (2020), "School of Thought: The Conceptual, Language-Based Practice and Pedagogy of Sàn Art"
Jacob Zhicheng Zhang (2019), "Performing Stereotypes: The Art of Migration in Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee, and Ming Wong"

Work

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Histories both untold and unsung continue to shape art historical inquiries through absence. This course asks: What are the means and methods of filling in the negative spaces where documentation falls short, and where archives yield indifference if not violence? At times speculative, always imaginative, the craft of piecing together the lives left off historical records and administrative ledgers demand responsible research, methodological rigor, as well as radical openness. This seminar invites students to explore existing approaches by Saidiya Hartman, Margaret Hillenbrand, Alexander Nemerov, Sasha Su-Ling Welland, among others, before crafting their own.
Readings will consist of approximately one book per week (specific sections) as case studies of diverging approaches to the work of critical fabulation, jumping off from the starting point of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives. Other works to be studied include Margaret Hillenbrand's recent publication on migrant artists in China as well as Alexander Nemerov's portrait of his aunt, Diane Arbus.
Course work will typically include weekly reading responses as well as a final writing project in which each student develops their own approach, based on their individual research interests, to critical fabulation.

Class Number

2154

Credits

3

Description

Hong Kong¿s revolution of our times. Taiwan¿s White Terror. Xu Bing¿s fake Chinese characters. Lu Yang¿s deep brain stimulation. Considering such multisensorial phenomena unfolding on a global stage, to what extent shall we regard human perception as a biological fact rooted in neurological functions best left to the understanding of scientists? How is perception particularized and socialized in critical social theory and everyday practice? What are some of the under-examined histories of perception for persons beyond the Euro-American west? Our class will take up these questions through a deep dive into critical texts, theories, and artworks that intersect across East Asia and North America, historically and in the present. Grounding our examinations of revolutionary movements of perception and creative practice, the class will address a selection of discourses that challenge the purported objectivity and universality of perception in transnational and diasporic frames, with special attention to contemporary China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Class Number

1223

Credits

3

Description

This independent study program for Master of Arts in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism candidates is taken in the final term of coursework.

Class Number

2540

Credits

3