Ana Paulina Lee

Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Humanities

Biography

Professor Lee joined the American University of Paris in 2025. She previously taught Latin American literature and culture at Columbia University for eight years and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her research moves between literature and history, examining how stories—archival, fictional, oral—shape the legal imagination, social life, and urban experience in the Americas. Working across genres and geographies, Lee traces how narrative functions as both a record and a force of social transformation.

As a scholar working at the crossroads of literature and history, Professor Lee takes an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together literary analysis with histories of labor and migration, law, performance, and urban studies. She is the author of Mandarin Brazil (Stanford University Press), which won the 2019 Best Book in the Humanities from the Latin American Studies Association. Her current book project, Black Magic City, forthcoming with Duke University Press, explores the logic of magic in shaping Brazilian republican law and literature. Her work has received the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the David Larson Fellowship from the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the Fulbright. 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.

Education/Degrees

Ph.D. University of Southern California M.A. New York University B.A. Binghamton University

Publications

Books:
  • Black Magic City: A Legal History of Spells in Modern Brazil (Duke University Press, forthcoming)
  • Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford University Press, 2018)
    • Articles:
  • “The Yellow Peril in Brazilian Popular Music.” Vraies Couleurs et Cultures, edited by Samuel Ludwig.
  • “Urban Sorcery, Segregation, and Spectacle in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro.” Luso-Brazilian Review, 58, no. 2 (2022): 118-143.
  • “Socially Engaged Oral History Pedagogy Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Oral History Review (2020): DOI: 10.1080/00940798.2020.1793678
  • “A estética da exclusão: imigrantes chineses em culturas visuais brasileiras na virada do século XX. Afro-Ásia 60 (2020): 149-187.
  • “Memory and Non-Place: Visual Testimonies of Japanese Latin American Internment during WWII.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 27, no. 3 (2019): 1-15.
  • “Memoryscapes of Race: Black Radical Parading Cultures of New Orleans.” The Drama Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 71-86.
  • “The Afterlives of Chico Rei.” Transmodernity, Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso Hispanic World 2, no. 1 (2012): 1-13.
  • “Literary Diplomacy in 19th Century Portuguese-Chinese Relations.” Connections Across the Spanish Pacific to the 1800s: Asia, Iberia, and Latin America, edited by Ana Rodriguez
  • Rodriguez and Leo J. Garofalo. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
  • “Transpacific Relations and Chinese Labor in the Américas.” Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Latin America, edited by Graciela Montaldo and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz.   New York: Routledge, 2024.
  • “Global South Feminisms in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Patricia Galvão’s Parque Industrial.” Chinese Texts in the World, edited by Stephen Roddy and Cai Zong- qi,  223-241. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

Awards, Fellowships & Grants

David B. Larson Fellowship in Health and Spirituality, Kluge Center, United States Library of Congress (2025-2026)
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2025)
Social Sciences Research Council, Inaugural Recipient of Interdisciplinary Projects in the Social Sciences (2020-2023)
Institute for Ideas and Imagination Fellowship, Columbia University in Paris, France (2021-2022)
Provost’s Tsunoda Senior Fellowship, Visiting Scholar, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan (2019)
Heyman Center Fellow, The Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University (2017-2018)           
Fulbright, Lisbon, Portugal (2013-2014)