Overview
Dr. Lee is Frances Hill Fox 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).
Her latest book, Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era was published in 2022 and received numerous awards, including the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research and the John W. Frick Award. She also 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.
In 2023, she received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research.
http://estherkimlee.com
