Gregory B. Lee


Gregory B. Lee is an academic, author, and broadcaster. Lee is Professor of Chinese and Transcultural Studies at Jean Moulin University Lyon 3 and Director of the French research Institute for Transtextual and Transcultural Studies. Lee was previously Chair Professor of Chinese and Transcultural Studies at City University of Hong Kong where he established, and was the founding director of, the Hong Kong Advanced Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Studies. He also served as Dean of City University's College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. From 2007 to 2010 Lee was First Vice-President of Jean Moulin University Lyon 3. In 2010, Lee was made a Chevalier in the French Order of Academic Palms. In 2011, he was elected Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.

Academic career

Lee received his undergraduate degree in modern and classical Chinese at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies in 1979, and his PhD in Chinese poetry from the same institution in 1985. He also studied political economy and Chinese literature at Peking University as a British Council Scholar, and held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences's Institute of Literature, whose then director was Liu Zaifu.
Lee formerly taught in the United Kingdom at the University of Cambridge and the School of Oriental and African Studies, before occupying posts as an assistant professor in East Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago and associate professor at the University of Hong Kong, where he taught comparative literature. A specialist in Chinese and comparative literary and cultural studies, his more recent work is in the realm of comparative cultural history, specifically in the fields of Chinese diaspora, transcultural studies, and intellectual decolonization. He joined the University of Lyon in 1998.

Writings

In tune with the 1980s academic tendency towards the single-author monography, Lee's first book analysed the work and career of an important but, until then, neglected poet. Dai Wangshu: The Life and Poetry of a Chinese Modernist, published by the Chinese University Press, was singled out for its "fastidious scholarship". His second book, Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationalism and Hybridity in China and Its Others, discusses the controversy surrounding the "Chineseness" of modern Chinese writers following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. His third book was Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness. His China's Lost Decade: The Politics and Poetics of the 1980s was republished as a revised edition in 2012 by Zephyr Press. His Un Spectre hante la Chine : Les fondements de la contestation actuelle was published in April 2012. His China Dreaming: Exit 13 or China and the World in 2030 followed by China's Spectacular-oneiric Society and The Eighth Chinese Merchant and the Disappeared Chinese Seamen are both published in the iBooks platform.
Lee's China Imagined: From European Fantasy to Spectacular Power was published in 2018 by C. Hurst & Co.

Other professional activities

Lee has also been a frequent radio broadcaster on China and the Chinese diaspora. In 2005 he wrote and presented BBC Radio 3's Sunday Feature "Liver Birds and Laundrymen" in which he revisited the story of Europe's oldest Chinatown, in Liverpool, and interrogated dominant British perceptions of the Chinese.
He has also translated a variety of Chinese works, including those of contemporary poet Duo Duo, Dai Wangshu, and Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. Duo Duo was awarded the 2010 World Literature Today's Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Lee is the General Editor of the journal Transtexts-Transcultures.
Lee also writes for the media on Hong Kong issues.