By appointment through WASE
Profile
Christina Lee is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
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 forthcoming book, Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines of Early Spanish Rule (Oxford University Press), is the first non-religious study focused on the dynamic life of saints and their devotees in the Spanish Philippines from the sixteenth through the early part of the eighteenth century. It offers an in-depth analysis of the origins and development of the beliefs and rituals surrounding some of the most popular saints in the Philippines during the period of early Spanish rule, namely, Santo Niño de Cebu, Our Lady of Caysasay, Our Lady of La Naval, and Our Lady of Antipolo. This study recovers the voices of colonized Philippine subjects as well as those of Spaniards who, through veneration of miraculous saints, projected and relieved their grievances, anxieties, and histories of communal suffering. Based on critical readings of primary sources, it traces how individuals and their communities refashioned iconographic devotions to the Holy Child and to Mary by often introducing non-Catholic elements to their cults, derived from pre-Hispanic, animistic, or Chinese traditions. This book ultimately reveals how Philippine natives, Chinese migrants, and Spaniards reshaped the imported devotions as expressions of dissidence, resistance, and survival.