Esther Kim Lee
Professor of Theater Studies

Esther Kim Lee is Professor of Theater Studies, International Comparatives Studies, and History and the Director of Asian American and Diaspora Studies at Duke. She specializes in theatre history and dramatic criticism. She teaches and writes about Asian American theatre, Korean diaspora theatre, interculturalism, and globalization and theatre. 

She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which received the 2007 Award for Outstanding Book given by Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015). She is the editor of Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2012). From 2013 to 2014, she was the Chief Editor of Theatre Survey, the flagship journal of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), and served as ASTR’s Vice President for Publications from 2017 to 2019. Her new book, Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press in summer 2022. She has also just published with Bloomsbury a four-volume collection, Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources, which challenges the prevailing Eurocentric reading of modern drama.

 

 

Current Research Interests

Asian American theatre, racial representation, theatre history, globalization, Korean diaspora studies

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Contact Information

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