Yeongju Lee

Yeongju offers courses that center global processes of imperialism, modernization, and migration to approach the formation of cultural expressions, politics, race, gender, and sexuality in Latin American and Latinx communities. Her classes examine various genres of cultural production in hemispheric, translatic, and transpacific contexts to illuminate radical heterogeneity and planetary connectedness within Latin American and Latinx histories and cultures. She is offering  "El Caribe en vaivén"  in Spring 2024 and “The Latin American Pacific" in Fall 2024.

Yeongju's research interests span Latin American Studies, Latinx Studies, and Transpacific Studies with a focus on global coloniality and the comparative formation of race and gender. She is currently conducting a first book-length study on the contradictory effects of the Korean War in Puerto Rican and Mexican American communities, as well as in Latinx-Asian kinship formation. In her multilingual research, which encompasses literary works and historical materials produced in Spanish, English, and Korean, Yeongju examines how the militarized inclusion of Latinx subjects into U.S. transpacific military expansion complicated their positionality in the global and domestic social order against the Cold War realignment of infrastructural, racial, and political conditions. Her book project considers the lasting impacts of imperial politics on interracial, intra-ethnic, class, and gender relations as they have played out both in Korea and in Latinx communities.