Overview

Shelley Lee is a Professor of American Studies and History and an affiliate of Urban Studies at Brown University. Prior to joining Brown, she was a Professor of History and chair of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. Her scholarship and teaching focus on the histories of immigration, race relations, Asian Americans, and U.S. cities during the twentieth century. Her articles have been published in journals such as Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and the Western Historical Quarterly, and books include Koreatown, Los Angeles: Race, Immigration, and the American Dream (Stanford University Press, 2022); A New History of Asian America (Routledge 2013) and Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America (Temple University Press, 2011). Other writings on subjects from college student activism to the Me Too movement in higher ed have been published in online venues such as Ms. Magazine, Inside Higher Ed, and Salon. She is working on various projects related to Asian American public history, the history of undocumented immigration, and an updated edition of A New History of Asian America. 

She co-leads a new working group on Asian Pacific American and Diaspora Studies at Brown, which you can learn more about here. 

Brown Affiliations

• American Studies
• History

Research Areas