Ana Paulina Lee

Ana Paulina Lee is Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. She is a scholar, writer, and digital media producer whose work focuses on cultural histories of migration, climate, and diaspora, with a focus on Asian and African diasporas in Latin America and Portuguese Asia and Africa. She is the author of Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford University Press) winner of the 2019 Antonio Candido Prize for Best Book in the Humanities. Her podcasts and documentary projects include, Memória e Saberes, made in collaboration with Ilê Omolu e Oxum candomblé terreiro in Rio de Janeiro and Memória 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.

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. The social action-centered working group converges at the intersection of research, action, and artistic practice to fortify civil liberties concerning self-housing settlements in Rio de Janeiro and Bombay/Mumbai. Professor Lee also co-leads the Columbia World Project, Planting Stories: Seeds of Diaspora, which attends to the migration histories of plants and their relationship to human movements, cultural practices, and health. The project team develops educational materials for use by learning institutions across New York City.  Lee is also a member of the Climate School Earth Networks: Bridging Scientific and Artistic Approaches, which brings together botanical studies, herbal medicine, cultural studies, and artistic production as a means to address contemporary climate change issues and environmental justice.

Professor Lee takes an interdisciplinary, global, and local approach to researching and teaching. She has conducted research and study on Latin American Performance and Politics with the Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya in Chiapas, Mexico and the Yuyachkani Theater Collective in Lima, Peru. Lee has published non-fiction narratives, research articles, essays, and translations in the 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. Lee's research has received the support of numerous grants, including the Social Sciences Research Council, Mellon, Fulbright, and the Fundação Luso-Americana.