Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee is a researcher of culture, ideology, and political economy on the twentieth-century Korean peninsula. Her interests include histories of gendered and racialized entertainment labor, creative and cultural work’s decommodification and dis/location in understandings of work, as well as post-revolutionary affect and political memory in South Korean culture. Her current project, Kisaeng: A History of Women’s Entertainment Labor in Korea, 1900–1950, narrates a labor history of the early-twentieth-century kisaeng, a class of state-regulated women entertainers in Korea. The project meditates on the historical illegibility of entertainment work as work and on the long-standing dismissals of the political consciousness of entertainment workers. Lee also conducts research on the afterlives of revolutionary songs in South Korea, the history of telephone operators in colonial Korea, the global preservationist fascination with Korean haenyeo/deep-sea divers, and the place of music in the leftist intellectual culture of Korea’s interwar period. She received her PhD in music history and ethnomusicology from Harvard University and has worked as a translator-interpreter for various community, labor, and media groups and projects.