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Ana Paulina Lee

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Ana Paulina Lee

Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Humanities

  • Department: Comparative Literature, English, and Creative Writing

Professor Lee joined the American University of Paris in 2025. She previously taught Latin American literature and culture at Columbia University for eight years and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her research moves between literature and history, examining how stories鈥攁rchival, fictional, oral鈥攕hape the legal imagination, social life, and urban experience in the Americas. Working across genres and geographies, Lee traces how narrative functions as both a record and a force of social transformation.

As a scholar working at the crossroads of literature and history, Professor Lee takes an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together literary analysis with histories of labor and migration, law, performance, and urban studies. She is the author of聽Mandarin Brazil聽(Stanford University Press), which won the 2019 Best Book in the Humanities from the Latin American Studies Association. Her current book project,听Black Magic City,聽forthcoming with Duke University Press, explores the logic of magic in shaping Brazilian republican law and literature. Her work has received the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the David Larson Fellowship from the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the Fulbright. Lee聽has published non-fiction narratives, research articles, essays, and translations in the聽Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies,听The Drama Review, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures,听The Blackwell Companion to Luis Bu帽uel, The Global Studies Journal, e-misf茅rica, and Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World.



Education/Degrees

Ph.D. University of Southern California
M.A. New York University
B.A. Binghamton University

Publications

Books:

  • Black Magic City: A Legal History of Spells in Modern Brazil聽(Duke University Press, forthcoming)
  • Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory聽(Stanford University Press, 2018)

Articles:

  • 鈥淭he Yellow Peril in Brazilian Popular Music.鈥澛�Vraies Couleurs et Cultures,听edited by Samuel Ludwig.
  • 鈥淯rban Sorcery, Segregation, and Spectacle in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro.鈥澛�Luso-Brazilian Review, 58, no. 2 (2022): 118-143.
  • 鈥淪ocially Engaged Oral History Pedagogy Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic.鈥澛�Oral History Review聽(2020): DOI:聽10.1080/00940798.2020.1793678
  • 鈥淎 est茅tica da exclus茫o: imigrantes chineses em culturas visuais brasileiras na virada do s茅culo XX.聽础蹿谤辞-脕蝉颈补听60 (2020): 149-187.
  • 鈥淢emory and Non-Place: Visual Testimonies of Japanese Latin American Internment during WWII.鈥澛�Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies聽27, no. 3 (2019): 1-15.
  • 鈥淢emoryscapes of Race: Black Radical Parading Cultures of New Orleans.鈥澛�The Drama Review聽61, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 71-86.
  • 鈥淭he Afterlives of Chico Rei.鈥澛�Transmodernity,听Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso Hispanic World聽2, no. 1 (2012): 1-13.
  • 鈥淟iterary Diplomacy in 19th聽Century Portuguese-Chinese Relations.鈥澛�Connections Across the Spanish Pacific to the 1800s: Asia, Iberia, and Latin America,听edited by Ana Rodriguez
  • Rodriguez and Leo J. Garofalo. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
  • 鈥淭ranspacific Relations and Chinese Labor in the Am茅ricas.鈥澛�Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Latin America,听edited by Graciela Montaldo and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz.聽聽 New York: Routledge, 2024.
  • 鈥淕lobal South Feminisms in Maxine Hong Kingston鈥檚聽The Woman Warrior聽and Patricia Galv茫o鈥檚聽Parque Industrial.鈥澛�Chinese Texts in the World,听edited by Stephen Roddy and Cai Zong- qi,听 223-241. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

Research Areas

  • Literature and the social imagination in the Americas

  • Slavery, emancipation, and the legacies of colonialism

  • Magic and the state in Latin American cultural texts

  • Asian and African diasporas in Latin America

  • Memory, architecture, and the afterlives of colonial cities

  • Magical realism, speculative fiction, and occult logics

Awards, Fellowships and Grants

  • David B. Larson Fellowship in Health and Spirituality, Kluge Center, United States Library of Congress (2025-2026)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2025)
  • Social Sciences Research Council, Inaugural Recipient of Interdisciplinary Projects in the聽Social Sciences (2020-2023)
  • Institute for Ideas and Imagination Fellowship, Columbia University in Paris, France (2021-2022)
  • Provost鈥檚 Tsunoda Senior Fellowship, Visiting Scholar, Waseda University,听Tokyo, Japan (2019)
  • Heyman Center Fellow, The Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University (2017-2018)聽 聽 聽 聽 聽 聽
  • Fulbright, Lisbon, Portugal (2013-2014)聽 聽 聽 聽聽