Esther Kim Lee
Professor of Theater Studies

Esther Kim Lee is Professor in Theater Studies and International Comparatives Studies 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. 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 was  ASTR’s Vice President for Publications. Her latest published book is The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), and her new book, Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era will be published by the University of Michigan Press in 2022. 

 

 

Current Research Interests

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

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Contact Information

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