Christina Lee was born in South Korea and raised in Argentina. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a concentration in Latin American literature and earned a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton. She returned to Princeton in 2007 after teaching at Connecticut College, San Jose State University, UC Berkeley, and Harvard University. She teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in her department and, occasionally, for the Council of the Humanities and the Freshman Seminar Program.
Her publications include: The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain (Manchester University Press, 2015), The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources (with Ricardo Padrón, Amsterdam University Press, 2020) , the collection of essays Western Visions of Far East in a Transpacific Age (Routledge [Ashgate], 2012), Reading and Writing Subjects in Medieval and Golden Age Spain: Essays in Honor of Ronald E. Surtz (with José Luis Gastañaga, Juan de la Cuesta, 2016), and the Spanish edition of Lope de Vega’s Los mártires de Japón (Juan de la Cuesta, 2006). She is also the co-editor of the global history book series Connected Histories in Early Modern Europe (with Julia Schleck), at Amsterdam University Press.
Christina Lee’s current book project, Saints of Resistance: Transpacific Devotions in the Spanish Philippines (under contract), examines the origin and development of some of most popular iconographic devotions of the Philippines, namely, Santo Niño de Cebú, Our Lady of Antipolo, Our Lady La Naval, and Our Lady of Caysasay. Based on the examination of archival documents, literary texts, and visual material gathered mostly in the Philippines, Spain, and the United States, Christina Lee sheds light on how these devotions were shaped by the socio-cultural convergences and the fraught entanglements among the indigenous, Chinese, mestizos, and Spaniards, yielding unique religious practices that reflect the merging of Eastern and Western cultures in the Philippines.