Professor of African History, World History, and African Literature

Professor of African History, World History, and African Literature

Christopher J. Lee is a Professor of African History, World History, and African Literature at The Africa Institute. Since completing his Ph.D. at Stanford University, he has held a range of faculty appointments in Africa and North America, including at Stanford, Harvard, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Research

Lee has published seven books, with his most recent book Culture and Liberation: Exile Writings, 1966-1985 (London and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2022) being a volume of essays, reportage, and fiction by the South African writer and anti-apartheid activist Alex La Guma (1925-85).

His articles and reviews have appeared in a number of journals including the Journal of African History, the American Historical Review, Social History, Law and History Review, Gender and History, Research in African Literatures, Modern Fiction Studies, College Literature, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Transition, Politique Africaine, the South African Historical Journal, Radical History Review, and elsewhere.

Lee has edited or coedited special issues of Safundi (2007), Kronos: Southern African Histories (2011), and Radical History Review (2018). His work has also appeared in a range of edited volumes, most recently in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (2018), The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (2020), Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Toward New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations (2020), and India after World History: Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization (2022). He is a Contributing Editor at Africa is a Country and Lead Editor of Safundi.

Publications

  • Culture and Liberation: Exile Writings, 1966-1985. Seagull, 2022.
  • Kwame Anthony Appiah. Routledge, 2021.
  • A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition. Lexington Books, 2017. Rev. paperback 2019.
  • Jet Lag. Bloomsbury, 2017. Chinese translation 2021.
  • Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism. Ohio University Press, 2015.
  • Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa. Duke University Press, 2014.
  • Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives. Ohio University Press, 2010. Rev. second edition 2019.