Steven Lee
Assistant Professor415 Wheeler
Office Hours, Spring 2013: M 10:10-12:10; W 10:30-11:30
stevenlee@berkeley.edu
Professional Statement
My research interests include twentieth-century American literature, comparative ethnic studies, and Soviet and post-Soviet studies. After graduating from Amherst College, I was among the inaugural group of Fulbright students to be sent to the Central Asian Republics, where I compared Soviet Korean and Korean American literatures and histories. I then received my doctorate from Stanford's Modern Thought and Literature program, and began teaching at Berkeley in 2009.
Specialties
Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
“Revisiting Langston Hughes’ Moscow Movie.” Russian-American Links: African Americans and Russia (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2009): 323-352.
“Borat, Multiculturalism, Mnogonatsional’nost’.” Slavic Review 67, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 19-34.
“‘Cultural Pluralism’ and ‘the Self-Determination of Nations’: Towards a Dialogue Between American Multiculturalism and Soviet Mnogonatsional’nost’.” Georgian Journal of American Studies 4 (Tbilisi, 2006): 377-381.
Gallery: “The Moscow Metropolitan.” Crowds website, Stanford Humanities Laboratory, http://crowds.stanford.edu/.
“Twilight of the Idyll: Mythic meets modern in Pequot museum.” Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress (October/November 1998): 32.
Current Research
“The Ethnic Avant-Garde: American Minority Cultures and World Revolution” emerges from two prominent emphases within American ethnic and literary studies—first, minority writers’ conceptualization of identities beyond the nation; and second, the radical, cross-ethnic ties behind struggles for civil rights and cultural recognition. “The Ethnic Avant-Garde” synthesizes these emphases by tracing the imprint of the Soviet avant-garde and “really existing socialism” on U.S. minority culture. Through a reexamination of Jewish American, African American, and Asian American literature from the 1920s to the present, the project focuses on how the notions of ethnic particularism and cultural authenticity gained currency in post-World War II America—in part as responses to socialist visions of racial and ethnic equality. It argues that in the wake of Stalin’s terror, McCarthy’s witch-hunts, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, American embraces of socialist internationalism gave way to liberal pluralism, which seemed to prevail after the Cold War's end. The project concludes with a reconsideration of this outcome, and explores renewed efforts to imagine alternatives to global capitalism from minority perspectives.
Recent English Courses Taught
Spring, 2013
| 45C/1 | Literature in English: Mid-19th Through the 20th Century |
Introductory Surveys British 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature |
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| 45C/101 -- discussion section |
Fleishman, Katie |
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| 45C/102 -- discussion section |
Greer, Erin |
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| 45C/103 -- discussion section |
Gregory, Jane |
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| 203/3 | Graduate Readings: Ethnic Avant-Gardes |
American Literature African American Literature World Literature Literary Theory Graduate Courses |
Fall, 2011
| 132/1 | American Novel |
American Literature |