Sujin Lee

Credentials

PhD, Cornell University
MA, Yonsei University, Korea

Research Interests

• Colonialism, Capitalism, and Population Issues in the Japanese Empire
• Politics of Reproduction in Modern East Asia
• History of Feminism, Gender and Sexuality
• History of Science, Technology and Medicine

Biography

Sujin Lee received her PhD from the Department of History at Cornell University in 2017 and also holds an BA and an MA in Japanese History from Yonsei University, Korea. Her research interests encompass the Japanese Empire and its aftermath, modern discourses of population, eugenics, and motherhood, and issues of Feminism, gender, and sexuality in modern East Asia. Her dissertation, entitled “Problematizing Population: Politics of Birth Control and Eugenics in Interwar Japan” focuses on three strands of inquiry: the reappraisal of eugenics and birth control movements as transnational discourses on population control during the interwar period; the impacts of multiple population discourses on the reconfiguration of the Japanese population in terms of the target of the government; and the intersection of governmentality, scientific progressivism, and colonialism.

Before she moved to Victoria, Lee spent one year at UCLA as a postdoctoral fellow of the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies between 2017 and 2018. At UCLA, she worked on rewriting her dissertation into a book under the working title Problematic Bodies: Politics of Population Discourses in the Japanese Empire (1918-1945), and taught an undergraduate course titled “Race, Gender, and Science in the Japanese Empire.” Her course was focused on the making of scientific knowledge regarding race and gender classifications in the Japan’s Colonial Empire.

Lee joined the University of Victoria as an assistant professor in 2018. Her teaching interests are closely related to her research background and interests. She plans to teach crucial historical issues in the Asia-Pacific region including race and gender relations, post/colonialism, wartime/postwar discourses of bodies, and nuclear history in Asia.

Publications

“Differing Conceptions of "Voluntary Motherhood": Yamakawa Kikue's Birth Strike and Ishimoto Shizue's Eugenic Feminism.” The U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 52 (2018, February)

“Technologies of the Population Problem: The Neo-Malthusian Birth Control Movement in Interwar Japan.” The Annual Review of Cultural Studies 5 (2017)

“Book Review – Jika to Sensō: hakushū to minshū sōryokusen e no michi by Toshio Nakano.” Journal of Japanese History 38 (2014): 223-30. (in Korean)

“Japanese Modern Midwives and the Politics of Childbirth in the Interwar Period” Journal of Japanese History 34 (2011): 137-70. (in Korean)

“Latest Studies on the Japanese Modern Midwives.” Yonsei Journal of Medical History 11-2 (2008): 74-86. (in Korean)

“Book review - Japanese American Midwives: Delivering More Fruitful Cultural Histories.” Yonsei Journal of Medical History 11-2 (2008): 181-90. (in Korean)

“Women’s Roles in Modern East Asia” Japanese Cultural Studies 27 (2008): 455-60. (in Korean)

Courses

PAAS 103:
PAAS 300:
PAAS 380:
PAAS 500: