Lee Seung-Joon

I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. I received my B.A. and M.A. in Asian history (1993 and 1996) from Korea University, after which I headed to the University of California, Berkeley, where I completed my Ph.D. in History in 2005. Before joining the Department of History at the NUS in August 2007, I taught East Asian history as an assistant professor for two years at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. Through my past experience on two sides of the Pacific over decades, I fully enjoyed and developed my fondness for multi-cultural atmosphere. This eventually brought me to cosmopolitan Singapore to pursue my personal and intellectual journey. I am currently working on a book manuscript based on my dissertation, tentatively entitled, National Rice vs. Foreign Rice: Culture and Politics of Food Consumption in Modern China, 1900-1937. My research interests include social and cultural history of modern China with particular focus on the consumption of foodstuffs, discourse and practice of western medical knowledge, as well as the relations between science and modern statecraft in the rise of nationalism in twentieth-century China. As an approach to East Asian history with a broader perspective, I will incorporate modern Korean history into my teaching areas as well. In my own time, I used to practice running, cardio kickboxing, and many other types of gym activities. In these days, I am rather playing more with my two sons (mostly, swimming in a kid’s pool or mocking Pro Wrestling on a bed), while trying to regularly exercising.

Detailed CV can be found here.

TEACHING AREAS:

• Modern and Late Imperial China
• Modern East Asia
• Asia and the Modern World
• Cold War in East Asia
• Food and Environment in East Asia

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Books

• Revolutions at the Canteens: Labor, Energy, and the Politics of Diet in Industrial China, 1910s­–1950s (in progress)
• Gourmets in the Land of Famine: the Culture and Politics of Rice in Modern Canton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)

Journal Articles

• “Canteens and the Politics of Working-Class Diets in Industrial China, 1920-1937.”
  Modern Asian Studies 54, no.1 (Jan. 2020): 1-29.
• “Airborne Prawn and Decayed Rice: Food Politics in Wartime Chongqing.”
  Journal of Modern Chinese History 13, no. 1 (Sep. 2019): 124-147.
• “Expertise Marginalized: Quality Inspection and the Grain Market in RepublicanChina,” Frontiers of History in China 10, no. 4 (Dec. 2015): 668-94.
• “The Patriot’s Scientific Diet: Nutrition Science and Dietary Reform Campaigns in China, 1910s­­–1950s,” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 6 (Nov. 2015): 1808-39.
• “Taste in Numbers: Science and the Food Problem in Republican Guangzhou, 1927­–1937,” Twentieth-Century China 35, no. 2 (April, 2010): 81–103

Book Chapters

• “Striking for Rice: The Struggle for the ‘Rice Allowance’ in Republican China,” in Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labor, Edited by Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace (London: Verso, 2022)
• “Rice and Maritime Modernity: the Modern Chinese State and the South China Sea Rice Trade, 1911–1937,” Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. Edited by Francesca Bray, Dagmar Schafer, and Edda Fields-Black (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Book Reviews

• The Master in the Bondage: Factory Workers in China, 1949-2019 By Huaiyin Li (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), Journal of Asian Studies (forthcoming)
• Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order By Stefan Link, (Princeton University Press, 2020). H-Diplo (roundtable review, 2022)
• Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia. Eds. by Angela Ki Che Leung and Melissa L. Caldwell, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019) [in Korean]. Hanguk Kwahaksa hakhoe chi [The Korean Society for History of Science Revew] 43, no. 1 (Apr. 2021): 281-86.
• Bitter and Sweet: Food, Meaning, and Modernity in Rural China. By Ellen Oxfeld. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017) Journal of Asian Studies 77, no. 3 (Aug. 2018): 786-88.
• Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900–1937. By Poon Shuk-wah (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2011) China Review International 20, no.3 & 4 (2013): 359-62.
• Cuisine, Colonialism, and Cold War: Food in Twentieth-Century Korea. By Katarzyna J. Cwiertka. (London: Reaktion, 2012) Agricultural History 88, no. 3 (Summer, 2014): 467-68.