Lee Seung Joon

Seung-joon Lee is currently Associate Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, he graduated from Korea University where he received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Asian history. He moved on to obtain a Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Gourmets in the Land of Famine: the Culture and Politics of Rice in Modern Canton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) and has published several more articles including “Taste in Numbers: Science and the Food Problem in Republican Guangzhou, 1927-1937,” Twentieth-Century China 35, no. 2 (April 2010) and “Rice and Maritime Modernity: the Modern Chinese State and the South China Sea Rice Trade,” in Francesca Bray, Dagmar Schafer and Edda Fields-Black eds. Rice: a Global History (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). His research focuses on the social, cultural, and political history of food production and consumption in modern East Asia. He is currently preparing a manuscript of his second book, tentatively titled Total War and Food Science in Modern China, 1931-1958.