De-nin Lee

Dr. De-nin Lee is an art historian who specializes in the history of art in China. She co-authored The History of Asian Art: A Global View(Thames & Hudson, 2023), and was on the team that wrote The History of Art: A Global View, now in its second edition (Thames & Hudson, 2026).

Her current research interest lies at the intersection of Chinese landscape and environmental concerns. She edited the anthology Eco-Art History in East and Southeast Asia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019). Her ecocritical articles have been published in Journal of Song-Yuan Studies (2015) and Verge (2016), and she contributed essays to Methods for Ecocritical Art History (2026) and Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective (2021).

Dr. Lee’s book, The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll in Time (University of Washington Press, 2010), examines the long cultural life of a Chinese handscroll painting, from legends of its 10th-century origins in imperial visual desire and surveillance to textual interventions made by viewers through modern times. Her other scholarly work has been included in such anthologies and museum catalogues as The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (Chinese University, 2010), A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (Blackwell, 2011), and China’s Imperial Modern: The Painter’s Craft (University of Alberta, 2012), and she published in Archives of Asian Art, Word & Image, and Journal of the American Oriental Society.

Dr. Lee has received grants from the Whiting Foundation, the National Museum of Korea, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Before coming to Emerson, she taught at Bowdoin College and Deep Springs College.