Haiyan LeeView profile
Professor
Haiyan Lee serves as the Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She has held these positions since joining Stanford in 2009, and currently serves as Chair of the East Asian Languages and Cultures department (2020-present). Her academic journey includes previous teaching appointments at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Hong Kong, along with post-doctoral fellowships at Cornell University and Harvard University. Lee's research spans multiple interdisciplinary fields with particular focus on modern Chinese literature and cultural production. Her work bridges literary studies with law, philosophy, cognitive science, affect theory, gender studies, and environmental humanities. She has developed influential theoretical frameworks including the concept of "high justice" and "low justice" in Chinese legal imagination. Her current research explores animism, cognition, and the Chinese environmental imagination, extending her longstanding interest in human-animal relations. Lee's publications reveal a consistent trajectory examining Chinese cultural production through innovative theoretical lenses. Her recent work shows increasing engagement with legal theory, environmental humanities, and cognitive approaches to literature. She has produced significant scholarship on Chinese concepts of justice, love, and the stranger, moving across historical periods from early 20th century to contemporary China. Biennial Book Prize, Honorable Mention, International Society for Chinese Law and History (ISCLH) (2024) Humanities Seed Grant, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences (2023-2025) Bass Fellowship in Undergraduate Education, Stanford University (2022-2027) Joseph Levenson Book Prize, The Association for Asian Studies (2009) Professor Lee actively mentors doctoral students across multiple disciplines, serving as dissertation advisor, co-advisor, and committee member for students working at the intersection of Chinese studies, law, literature, and cultural theory. Her teaching includes courses across East Asian humanities, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary environmental studies. She has received significant research support including the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and a residency at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
