Jieun LeeAssistant Professor, Theater Studies

Dr. Jieun Lee (she/her) is a teacher-scholar who believes that theatrical arts have the power to engender meaningful conversations and actions for social change. Dr. Lee’s teaching explores how race, class, gender, and sexuality have been represented in theater and performance and how those representations conform or contest the unequal power relations and unjust systems in our society and culture. Her research spotlights transnational adoption intersected with drama, media, and activism in and out of South Korea and the United States viewed through Asian and Asian American feminist perspectives. Dr. Lee is currently working on her first book entitled Performing Transnational Adoption: Unsettling Scripts. In this book, she analyzes Korean adoptees’ birth search and reunion represented in contemporary theater and performance art works from Korea, the US, the UK, Belgium, and Denmark that disrupt postwar humanitarian, colorblind multicultural, and ethnonationalist narratives surrounding transnational adoption from Korea. Her peer-reviewed articles and reviews have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Annual, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, and Women’s Studies, among others. Dr. Lee holds a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Georgia, and an MA in Theater Studies from Hunter College of the City University of New York. Since 2014, she has served as a volunteer translator for the South Korean Feminist Journal ILDA.