About

Dr. Esther Kim Lee is Frances Hill Fox Professor of Theater Studies, International Comparative Studies, and History and the Director of Asian American & Diaspora Studies at Duke University.

Dr. Lee teaches and writes about theatre history, Asian American theatre, Korean diaspora theatre, and globalization and theatre. You can read more about her background and how she approaches her research and teaching in this article.

Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. in Theatre History, Criticism, and Literature at The Ohio State University in 2000 and taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2000 to 2012 and at the University of Maryland from 2013 to 2018.

She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which received the 2007 Award for Outstanding Book given by Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015). She is the editor of Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2012). From 2013 to 2014, she was the Chief Editor of Theatre Survey, the flagship journal of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), and served as ASTR’s Vice President for Publications from 2017 to 2019. Her latest book, Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era (University of Michigan Press) was published in 2022.  She has also published with Bloomsbury a four-volume collection, Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources, which challenges the prevailing Eurocentric reading of modern drama.