Yoon Sun Lee

Yoon Sun Lee is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor in American Literature and Professor of English at Wellesley College. She holds appointments in both the English & Creative Writing Department and Comparative Literary Studies program. Her academic career spans British Romantic literature and Asian American literary studies, with a focus on novel theory and literary criticism.

Dr. Lee's research interests center on British eighteenth and nineteenth century prose fiction and Asian American literature. Her work spans British Romanticism, Asian American literature, novel theory, and literary theory. She examines how literary forms intersect with cultural, racial, and historical contexts, with particular attention to the everyday as an aspect of modernity and its significance for minority literature.

Her scholarship reveals trends connecting literary realism to broader cultural and historical contexts. Lee's work demonstrates how novels contribute to racial thinking through structures of equivalence and abstract value, examining how invisible boundaries of race take shape through labor and exchange in narrative structures. Her research connects literary analysis to questions of social justice and historical understanding.

Dr. Lee serves as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (2024) and sits on the Executive Committee of the MLA's English Romantic Forum. She co-convenes the Novel Theory Seminar at the Mahindra Center for the Humanities with Deidre Lynch and has served as a reader for the MLA's First Book Prize and James Russell Lowell Prize.

As a leading researcher, she is the Principal Investigator for a $1.5 million three-year Mellon Humanities for All Times grant titled 'Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives.' This project reflects her commitment to applying humanities scholarship to contemporary social issues and community engagement.