A.J. Yumi Lee
Election
Position
Name
A.J. Yumi Lee
Candidate statement
Bio:
A.J. Yumi Lee is an Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University. She received her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania and has held postdoctoral fellowships in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Dartmouth College. Her book, Counternarratives of the Korean War in Contemporary American Literature, is under contract with Temple University Press. She is the coeditor of Prehistories of the War on Terror: A Critical Genealogy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), and her other publications include essays in Radical History Review, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and The Baffler.
Candidate Statement:
My name is Yumi Lee, and I am a scholar of Asian American literature with a critical focus on race, militarism, and empire. I have worked in the mid-Atlantic area for my entire academic career, and I am running to join the AAAS board now because I believe AAAS can serve as an important institutional voice for our membership during this time of acute crisis. I am particularly interested in working with the AAAS board and membership to: a) strengthen our resources for, and act in solidarity with, our community members facing repression and persecution by universities and the state, including non-US citizens, SWANA and Muslim students and scholars, trans people, and those who have protested against the genocide in Gaza, and b) develop strategies to stand together against the attacks on so-called DEI that are threatening our research, our teaching, our academic freedom, our funding, our jobs, and our entire fields. I am proud that AAAS was the first US academic organization to endorse BDS in the struggle for a free Palestine, and I want to see AAAS maintain a steadfast commitment to anticolonial thought and praxis as a core part of our field’s identity and mission.
A.J. Yumi Lee is an Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University. She received her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania and has held postdoctoral fellowships in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Dartmouth College. Her book, Counternarratives of the Korean War in Contemporary American Literature, is under contract with Temple University Press. She is the coeditor of Prehistories of the War on Terror: A Critical Genealogy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), and her other publications include essays in Radical History Review, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and The Baffler.
Candidate Statement:
My name is Yumi Lee, and I am a scholar of Asian American literature with a critical focus on race, militarism, and empire. I have worked in the mid-Atlantic area for my entire academic career, and I am running to join the AAAS board now because I believe AAAS can serve as an important institutional voice for our membership during this time of acute crisis. I am particularly interested in working with the AAAS board and membership to: a) strengthen our resources for, and act in solidarity with, our community members facing repression and persecution by universities and the state, including non-US citizens, SWANA and Muslim students and scholars, trans people, and those who have protested against the genocide in Gaza, and b) develop strategies to stand together against the attacks on so-called DEI that are threatening our research, our teaching, our academic freedom, our funding, our jobs, and our entire fields. I am proud that AAAS was the first US academic organization to endorse BDS in the struggle for a free Palestine, and I want to see AAAS maintain a steadfast commitment to anticolonial thought and praxis as a core part of our field’s identity and mission.