Lee Medovoi

Lee Medovoi is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona and the Founding Chair (currently Vice Chair) of U Arizona’s Graduate Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. A graduate of the Ph.D. program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, he started the Portland Center for Public Humanities during his time at Portland State University. He was one of the founding board members of the Cultural Studies Association (US) and has been the principal investigator for two major grant projects: Neoliberalism at the Neopopulist Crossroads and a three-year international collaborative, research project through the Consortium of Humanities Center and Institutes on “Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging.” He is the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke 2005) and co-editor of Religion, Secularism and Political Belonging with Elizabeth Bentley (Duke, 2021). He publishes on global American studies, biopolitical theory, critical race studies, and ecocriticism 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."

Lee is currently writing a book on the genealogy of racial power entitled: Ensoulment: The Inner Life of Race from Pastoral Power to Racial Capitalism (forthcoming, Duke University Press). This year he is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.