Fred Lee
University of Connecticut, Storrs
Fred Lee received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles and his B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is jointly appointed between Political Science and Asian/Asian American Studies, and holds affiliations with Africana Studies, American Studies, and Philosophy. He works across the fields of contemporary political theory, U.S. political development, Asian/Asian American cultural studies, and comparative ethnic studies.
His book is Extraordinary Racial Politics: Four Events in the Informal Constitution of the United States (Temple, 2018). Here he argues that extraordinary events—including 1830s-1840s Southeastern Amerindian removals, the Japanese internment, the civil rights movement, and 1960s-1970s empowerment movements—have repeatedly reshaped “the informal U.S. constitution.” More generally, Lee argues that extraordinary racial politics have the power to remake the norms of and redirect the trajectories of everyday racial politics.
Lee is currently pursuing two streams of research. The first is on Asian American political thinkers such as Claire Kim and Grace Lee Boggs. This project aims to establish Asian American political thought as a critical perspective and academic field. The second is on artists in East Asian speculative fiction such Bong Joon-ho and Liu Cixin. The basic aim here is to explore East Asian speculative fiction as a genre of political thought with a transcontinental (Asian/American) bent.
Lee in other works has explored U.S. racial incorporation after the 1960s-1970s, the project of radical democracy, and the relationship of neoliberalism and authoritarianism.