S. Heijin Lee
Assistant Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I, MANOA
S. Heijin Lee is a Korean feminist who grew up in the diaspora both in Chicago, IL and Southern California where her family still resides today. Ethnic Studies courses at UC Berkeley in the late 1990s changed her life. She learned about the interconnected histories of communities of color and developed a tool kit with which to analyze and understand the world around her. The faculty of color she learned from and who mentored her changed the trajectory of her life, bringing her where she is today. She is deeply committed to doing the same for her own students.
Education
PhD, American Culture with a certificate in Women's Studies, University of Michigan, 2012
MA, Asian American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 2003
BA, Ethnic Studies and Spanish, University of California, Berkeley, 2000
Research Interests
She studies how power works through our everyday pleasures – a music video, make-up tutorial, a style or “look.” To this end, she has written about K-beauty, K-pop, feminist activism, and food. She finds that something as seemingly simple as beauty can tell us complicated stories about war, geopolitics, race, and gender. Heijin specializes in pop culture, digital media, and critical fashion and beauty studies. Her forthcoming book is called The Geopolitics of Beauty: Transnational Circulations of Plastic Surgery, Pop, and Pleasure.
