Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Shelley Lee is W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of American Studies, History, and Humanities and an affiliate of Urban Studies. Her scholarship focuses on Asian American history, immigration, race relations, and American cities in 20th-century America. Before joining Brown University in 2022, she served as Professor and Chair of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of several books, including Koreatown, Los Angeles: Race, Immigration, and the “American Dream” (Stanford University Press, 2022), A New History of Asian America (Routledge, 2013), and Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America (Temple University Press, 2011). Her work has been featured in journals such as Frontiers, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Western Historical Quarterly, as well as in outlets like Ms. Magazine and Salon. While on fellowship at the Cogut Institute, she will work on her book project, “Out of Status,” a history of “unauthorized” immigration in the United States from the 19th-century to the present that focuses on Asian migrants and serves as a critical meditation on the role of immigration bureaucracy in American life and global geopolitics.