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Ling U

Ling U

Ling U

Ling U

Ling U
VISUAL STUDIES Image ALT

Prof. Sangjoon LEE

PhD. New York University
MA. UCLA
BA. Dankook University

Associate Professor

Department of Digital Arts and Creative Industries
Lingnan University

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sangjoonlee@ln.edu.hk

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HSH202/1

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(852) 26167452



Professor Lee teaches and researches cinema studies at the Department of Visual Studies, Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He holds a Ph.D. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Cinema Studies and an MA in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA).


Professor Lee is a historian of Asian cinema whose interests span the Cultural Cold War, South Korean cinema and popular culture, international film festivals, and the film industries in contemporary Asia. He has extensively investigated film history in its socio-historical and industrial contexts, paying particular attention to issues of the national and the transnational, questions of ownership and control, the new regionalism, industrial networks, and the unprecedented cultural flows and mixing in cinema and media around Asia and the globe. Professor Lee is the author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network and the editor of Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media and Rediscovering Korean Cinema. He is currently completing a new monograph Destination Hong Kong: South Korean Cinema's Encounter with Sinophone Cinemas while co-editing The South Korean Film Industry, Asian Cinema and the Cultural Cold War, and Routledge Companion to Asian Cinema.


Professor Lee is the recipient of the Jay Leyda Award for Academic Excellence and the David H. Culbert Prize for the Best Article in Film and Media History. His works have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian. Prior to joining Lingnan University, he was an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University and assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was also a visiting professor at the Australian National University, Dankook University, and Yonsei University. Professor Lee is also a founding director of Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab), a virtual film studies initiative.

  • Research Interests

    South Korean cinema and popular culture, Cultural Cold War, international film festivals, and the film industries in contemporary Asia

  • Representative Publications

    Books

    • (Forthcoming 2023) Sangjoon Lee, Dal Yong Jin, Cho Junhyoung eds. The South Korean Film Industry. University of Michigan Press.

    • (Forthcoming 2023) Sangjoon Lee and Darlene Espena eds. Asian Cinema and the Cultural Cold War. Amsterdam University Press.

    • 2020. Sangjoon Lee. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network. Cornell University Press.

    • 2019. Sangjoon Lee, ed. Rediscovering Korean Cinema. University of Michigan Press.

    • 2015. Sangjoon Lee and Abe Mark Nornes, eds. Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media. University of Michigan Press.


    Edited Journal Special Issues

    • 2020. “Transmedia and Asian Cinema.” Asian Cinema, 31(2) (with Liew Kai Khiun).

    • 2019. “Reorienting Asian Cinema in the Age of the Chinese Film Market.” Screen, 60(2).

    • 2019. “The Chinese Film Industry: Emerging Debates.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 13(3) (with Leung Wing Fai)


    Recent Journal Articles and Book Chapters

    • 2020. (with Lee S.A, Worthy B., Choe, S., Nickl B, and E. Rayward). “The Appeal of Korea: Transnational Korean screen culture in America and Australia.” Australasian Journal of American Studies, 39(1): 149-190.

    • 2020. “Cinema and the Cultural Cold War in Asia.” Contemporanea, 23(3): 451-57.

    • 2019. “The South Korean Film Industry and the Chinese Film Market.” Screen, 60(2): 332-44.

    • 2019. “Introduction: Reorienting Asian cinema in the age of the Chinese film market.” Screen, 60 (2): 298-302.

    • 2019. “Introduction: The Chinese Film Industry - Emerging Debates.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 13(3): 198-201.

    • 2019. “Rediscovering Korean Cinema.” in Rediscovering Korean Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2019), 1-33.

    • 2019. “Seoul-Hong Kong-Macau: Love with an Alien (1957) and Postwar South Korea-Hong Kong Coproduction,” in Asia-Pacific Film Co-productions: Theory, Industry and Aesthetics (Routledge), 256-274.

    • 2018. “From the Committee for a Free Asia to The Asia Foundation: CIA, Cinema, and the Cultural Cold War in Asia.” Korean Studies Journal, 48: 49-84. [IN KOREAN]

    • 2018. “The Asian Film Festival and the Cultural Cold War in Korea,” in Worlding Korean Cinema or Korean Cinema Encountering the World (Contemporary Culture Publishing, Korea, 2018), 323-354 [IN KOREAN].

    • 2018. “Hawaii, Cannes, and Los Angeles: Projecting South Korean Cinema to the World.” International Journal of Korean History, 23(1): 123-140.

    • 2017. “La diplomazia culturale americana, la Guerra fredda e il cinema di Hong Kong negli anni Cinquanta” [American Cultural Diplomacy, Cold War, and Hong Kong Cinema in the 1950s], Cinema e Storia. Rivista di studi interdisciplinari, 5(1): 131-142. [IN ITALIA].

    • 2017. “Destination Hong Kong: The Geopolitics of South Korean Espionage Films in the 1960s.” The Journal of Korean Studies, 22(1): 346-364.

    • 2017. “The Asia Foundation’s Motion Picture Project and the Cultural Cold War in Asia.” Film History, 29(2): 108-137.

    • 2017. “Creating an Anti-Communist Motion Picture Producers’ Network in Asia: The Asia Foundation, Asia Pictures, and the Korean Motion Picture Cultural Association.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 37(3): 517-538.

    • 2017. “Dracula, Vampires, and Kung Fu Fighters: The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires and Transnational Horror Co-production in 1970s Hong Kong,” in Transnational Horror Cinema:Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque (Palgrave/MacMillan), 65-80.

    • 2015. “On John Miller's ‘The Korean Film Industry’: The Asia Foundation, KMPCA, and Korean Cinema, 1956.” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 7(2): 95-112.

    • 2015. “A Decade of Hallyu Scholarship in the English Language Sphere: Toward a New Direction in Hallyu 2.0.,” in Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (University of Michigan Press), 1-27.

    • 2015. “From Diaspora TV to Drama Fever.com: Korean TV Drama in America,” in Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (University of Michigan Press), 172-191.

    • 2013. “The Emergence of the Asian Film Festival: Cold War Asia and Japan’s Re-entrance to the Regional Market in the 1950s,” in Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2013), 232-250.

    • 2013. “Martial Arts Craze in Korea: Cultural Translation of Martial Arts Film and Literature in the 1960s,” in East Asian Cultural Heritage and Films (Palgrave/Macmillan), 173-195.

    • 2012. “It’s “Oscar” Time in Asia!: the Rise and Demise of the Asian Film Festival, 1954-1972,” in Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals (St. Andrews University Press), 173-187.

    • 2012. “Constructing Asian Cinema through Cultural Geopolitics: The Genealogy of Pan-Asian Big Pictures and the Predicament of the Contemporary South Korean Cinema.” Transnational Cinemas, 3(1): 93-106.

    • 2011. “Toward a Theory of Transnational Film History.” Contemporary Film Studies 11: 39-65.

  • Teaching

    Nanyang Technological University (2015-2022)

    • Korean Cinema in the Global Context

    • Film Festival: History and Theory

    • Global Film Cultures: Non-Western Cinema

    • Global Film Cultures: Hollywood and the West

    • Popular Cinema

    • Asian Cinema

    • Overseas Film Festival Practicum


    University of Michigan (2011-2013)

    • Hong Kong Cinema

    • The Global Blockbuster

    • Film Cultures in Korean Cinema

    • Transnational Film and Television in Globalizing Asia