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Jieun LeeAssociate Professor, Theater StudiesDirector of Undergraduate Research (Scholarship), Theater Studies
Biography
Jieun Lee is an Associate Professor of Theater Studies at Emory University. Her research spotlights theater and performance as a crucial site where transnational and transracial adoption can be critically examined as well as creatively expressed to engender insightful interventions for social justice and transformation.
Lee is the author of Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption (Ohio State University Press, 2025). In this book, she examines twelve theater and performance art works from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Denmark, which depict Korean transnational adoptees’ birth search and reunion, mostly authored by adoptee artists. Lee argues that performing transnational adoption unsettles ethnonationalist, postwar humanitarian, and colorblind multicultural narratives that have essentialized Korean adoptees in both adoptive and birth cultures. Her analysis highlights selected theater and performance pieces that challenge myths about Korean transnational adoption and reimagine adoptees’ identity, kinship, and belonging in the twenty-first century.
At Emory, Lee teaches the courses Asian American Drama, Theater and Feminism, and Reading for Performance. In her classes, students analyze how race, gender, and sexuality are depicted in theater and performance, evaluating how these portrayals both reflect and resist systemic inequalities and power imbalances within and beyond US society. Through her teaching, she hopes her students will learn and practice the transformative power of theatrical arts.
Lee holds a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Georgia (UGA), and an MA in Theater Studies from Hunter College of the City University of New York. Prior to Emory, Lee taught at UGA and Wake Forest University. Since 2014, she has served as a volunteer translator for the South Korean Feminist Journal ILDA.
