Overview

Shelley Lee is the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of American Studies, History, and the Humanities at Brown University. 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, second edition 2026) 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 books about the history of undocumented immigration and bureaucratization in the US; and nonpersonhood, migration, and US-Korea relations.

From 2025 to 2030, she is leading a multi-year project titled "The Origins and Afterlives of Ethnic Studies." As part of the initiative, she co-hosts the podcast The Confluence: Ethnic Studies and the Public Good. 

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

Brown Affiliations

• American Studies
• Cogut Institute for the Humanities
• History

Research Areas