Peggy Kyoungwon Lee, PhD
Dr. Peggy K. Lee
이경원

Peggy (she/her) is a scholar in contemporary American literature, performance, and media. She is currently UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. In Fall 2022, she will join as Assistant Professor of English and Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow with a focus on critical race and ethnic studies at Georgetown University.
She is a creative writer. Recently, Peggy was awarded 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow in Speculative Fiction with Larissa Lai.

Research Specialization
- Contemporary Ethnic U.S. Literature and Poetry
- Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
- Asian American Studies
- Performance Studies
- Sound and Media Studies
- Disability Studies
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
Recent Publication
“The Alpha Orient: Lisa Park and Yoko Ono,” TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 66 (2) [June 2022]

Teaching

Listening to Race: Feminist Methods in Sound and Media, University of California, Davis, Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (2021)
How do we listen to race? What methods, theories, and technologies can help us amplify or clarify the co-constitutions of race, gender, and sound? As critical listeners, how do our own identities and abilities shape our listening practices and values? This course surveys the fields of feminist thought, media studies, musicology, critical race theory, performance studies, popular music, disability studies, and experimental aesthetics to understand sound and musical cultures as significant matters in the histories of race, colonialism, gender, and sexuality.

Staying “Cool”: Race and Femininity
Emory University, Department of African American Studies (2022)
The concept of cool comprises many meanings from composure to popularity; but cool also offers a dynamic and conflicted optics or surface where race, gender, capital, illness, violence, and resistance, come together or fall apart. This course introduces students to theories and iterations of “cool” as it crosses contemporary African American, Asian American, and Afro Asian history, art, activism, and culture.

Aesthetics of Resistance in Literature, University of California, Davis, Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (2021)
This course explores how writing is an act of risk that carries the stakes of history and future possibility. And taking risks, or creating in spite of what could be lost, hurt, or compromised, is a central feature of what we understand as “resistance.” This course will approach this question of risk and literature by focusing on the impact of contemporary feminist thought on literary production, literary interpretation, and aesthetics. Students will be asked to closely attend to the variety of generated forms and critical aesthetics from the course readings which span literary genres, social movements, and methods of circulation.