Sujin Lee

Position
Contact
Area of expertise
Modern Japanese history; Japanese imperialism and colonialism; gender and sexuality in East Asia; history of science, technology, and medicine.
Credentials
MA, Yonsei University, Korea
Research Interests
- Population discourses in the Japanese Empire
- Politics of reproduction in Modern East Asia
- Biopolitics and feminist theories on body politics
Biography
Sujin Lee is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of Victoria. Lee completed her PhD in History from Cornell University in 2017 and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies in 2017–18. She is an author of articles on the birth control movement in Interwar Japan and book: Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 2023). Her research interests encompass the history of the Japanese colonial empire, biopolitical governance of bodies and its gender impacts, and historical narratives of women's reproductive experiences.
Selected Publications
Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan, Stanford University Press, 2023.
“South Korea: Democracy, Innovation, and Surveillance” (Co-authored) Covid-19 in Asia: Law and Policy Contexts; Edited by Victor V. Ramraj. Oxford: Oxford University Press USA (2020): pp. 239-50.
“Differing Conceptions of “Voluntary Motherhood”: Yamakawa Kikue’s Birth Strike and Ishimoto Shizue’s Eugenic Feminism”, The U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 52, 2018, pp. 3-22.
“Technologies of the Population Problem: The Neo-Malthusian Birth Control Movement in Interwar Japan”, The Annual Review of Cultural Studies 5, 2017, pp. 37-58.