Ana Paulina Lee
On Research Leave during Spring Semester 2025
Ana Paulina Lee is Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. Broadly, her research and teaching are representative of three academic fields, Comparative Literature, History, and Media studies. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection between text, technology, and performance with a focus on Luso-Brazilian historical intersections with Africa and Asia.
She is the prizewinning author of Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford University Press) winner of the 2019 Antonio Candido Prize, Latin American Studies Association. The book examines the writings of Chinese, Portuguese, and Brazilian intellectuals and liberal reformers such as Fu Yunlong, Eça de Queiroz, and Machado de Assis to analyze how these thinkers adapted Enlightenment discourses about liberalism, chattel slavery, and democracy to address their specific political and economic contexts related to labor experiments, settler colonialism, and shifting notions of race, gender, and nation. Her second book, Coding Witchcraft: Race, Religion, and Public Health in Modern Brazil (Duke University Press, forthcoming) retraces how historical subjects used technologies of performance, literature, and law to make claims to the city by manipulating the relationship between the occult and the obfuscated, the sacred and the mercantile, and translation and power. The NYTimes recently interviewed Prof. Lee regarding this topic.
Professor Lee co-directs the working group, Geographies of Injustice, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Center for Spatial Research, and the Social Sciences Research Council. Since 2018, this working group has been dedicated to studying historical formations and transformations to structures of race, religion, and caste in Iberian Indian and Pacific Ocean Worlds. The dialogues and essays developed from these gatherings are forthcoming in the edited volume Iberian Moments: Race/Caste in Asia, Africa, and the Americas (co-edited with Anupama Rao).
In addition to authoring books and articles, Lee uses digital technologies to create inclusive and public-facing educational programming. Her podcast and documentary projects include, Memórias e Saberes, made in collaboration with Ilê Omolu Oxum Candomblé terreiro (temple) in Rio de Janeiro. In this podcast, Candomblé leaders explain the meaning of their terreiro, founded on Orixá traditions, Ubuntu philosophy, and the forged sense of ancestry in diaspora. The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia provided funding to support this work.
The podcast Música e Migração, made in collaboration with the Sankofa Memory and History Museum in Rocinha and Observatório de Favelas in the Maré Complex, in Rio de Janeiro features interviews with artists, musicians, and writers who live in Rio’s favelas as a means to feature the favela as a zone of rich artistic and cultural life in face of challenges such as the migration cycles of resettlement and displacement that occur due to war, climate change, and economic crisis. The Social Sciences Research Council provided funding to support this project.
Working with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, Lee co-led the pilot program for the 1937 Nanking Massacre Visual History archive, which consisted of collecting life history testimonies of 12 survivors of the Nanking Massacre. The archive has since expanded to 102 life history testimonies, making it the world’s fullest account of the war told from the perspective of survivors. This project was done in collaboration with the Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall, Nanjing, China.
Lee has studied Indigenous theater and performance with the Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya in Chiapas, Mexico and the Yuyachkani Theater Collective in Lima, Peru. She has published research articles, essays, and translations in the Luso-Brazilian Review, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, The Drama Review, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures, The Blackwell Companion to Luis Buñuel, The Global Studies Journal, e-misférica, and Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World.