Lee Medovoi

Professor
Lee Medovoi

Modern Languages 471

medovoi@arizona.edu
Research Areas
20th and 21st literature
Capitalism and environment
Race and religion

Lee Medovoi is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona and Founding Chair of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. Lee received his Ph.D. program in Modern Thought and Literature from  Stanford University. He is the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke 2005) and of The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls and the History of Racial Power (Duke 2024). He has published widely on global American studies, biopolitical theory, critical race studies, and the environmental humanities in such journals as Cultural Critique, Minnesota Review, Screen, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Mediations, New Formations, American Literary History, and Social Text. He has also co-edited  a special issue of the journal Social Text with Keith Feldman (UC Berkeley) on the topic of “Race/Religion/War.” 

Between 2013 and 2016 he was the Principal Investigator for a three-year international Mellon Grant that explored the changing vectors of religion and secularism’s imbrications in political life across the globe. This project resulted in a collection co-edited with Elizabeth Bentley titled  Religion, Secularism and Political Belonging  (Duke, 2021). In 2020, Lee was also the Principal Investigator for a Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar titled Neoliberalism at the Neopopulist Crossroads that explored the social, economic and cultural underpinnings of the rise of far-right populist movements around the world. In 2021-22, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He is currently developing plans for a new book on the environmental unconscious of far-right politics of populist racism. He is also actively involved in the University of Arizona’s Environmental Humanities Consortium.