Joanna SW Lee-Brown 李素文

Joanna Lee-Brown is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese literature, affiliated with the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. Her dissertation explores the shifting relationship between global Islam, socialism, and Third World internationalism in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the 1950s to the present. It asks if religion is compatible with global emancipatory left-wing politics by tracing Chinese Muslims’ historical attempts to theorize and narrativize the relationship between Islam, anti-imperialism, and socialism through translingual writing and media practices. She works primarily with Chinese and Arabic in her research.

Joanna has conducted archival research in both China and Egypt. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences Research Council Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF), as well as by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) and Weatherhead East Asian Institute (WEAI) at Columbia University. Her study of Arabic at the prestigious Center for Arabic Study in Cairo (CAASIC) at the American University of Cairo (AUC) was supported by the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship. She has presented her research at the Association of Asian Studies (AAS) and Middle East Studies Association (MESA) annual conferences, as well as at workshops at Columbia University and Lingnan University in Hong Kong.Joanna believes that education in the humanities remains critical to responding to the crises of our times. Competitively selected to be a Columbia GSAS Teaching Scholar, she is currently teaching her own course, “Religion and Revolution in Modern China and the World”, at Columbia University.

You can learn more about Joanna at https://joannaleebrown.com/