UCLA Center for the Study of Women

The daughter of immigrants, Rachel C. Lee grew up in suburban New Jersey and attended a small high school with only about five hundred students. Of those, she “was one of three Asian Americans, maybe ten people of color in my high school.” Looking for a larger, more diverse environment, she enrolled at Cornell University, where she majored in English. After graduating, she received a George W. Woodruff Fellowship at Emory University, where she studied with Hortense J. Spillers. In 1991, she arrived at UCLA to pursue a Ph.D. in English Literature. After holding a post-doc at UC Berkeley, she joined the faculty at UCLA in 1995. An Associate Professor in English and Women’s Studies, she was appointed CSW Associate Director in September of 2011. Her year-long project is “Life (Un) Ltd.,” which will address the impact of recent developments in the biosciences and biotechnology on feminist studies. Recently, she kindly sat downand chatted with CSW Update about her history and the development of her project.