Fiona Lee

Dr. Fiona Lee is Senior Lecturer in English at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya (UM), Malaysia. She received her PhD in English at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research explores histories of decolonization and the global Cold War through the study of literature and the arts, with a focus on Malaysia and Southeast Asia. She teaches in the fields of postcolonial/world anglophone literatures, gender studies, and cultural studies. Her essays on Malaysian literature, art, cinema, and culture have appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals as well as literary, cultural, and art publications. She has held academic appointments at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (2014-2016) and the University of Sydney, Australia (2016-2021). 

At the Harvard-Yenching Institute, she will be working on a monograph tentatively titled, Racial Binds: Paradoxes of the Global Anglophone in Malaysian Literature. The book explores the evolving meanings and uses of English as a world literary language and its impact on the politics of race and language in Malaysia’s ethno-linguistically diverse contexts.