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. A second, thoroughly revised edition of A New History of Asian America will be published by Routledge in 2026, and she is working on a new book project about the history of Asian undocumented immigration and the bureaucratic state in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
From 2025 to 2030, she will be the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of American Studies, History, and Humanities, leading a project titled "The Origins and Afterlives of Ethnic Studies" as a Humanities Initiative Scholar in Residence at the Cogut Institute.
She co-leads a working group on Asian Pacific American and Diaspora Studies at Brown, which you can learn more about here.
