Xavier Lee

Click to read my CV. (last updated: Mar 21 2024)

Xavier Lee is a scholar of comparative literature, critical theory and the history of ideas. He is affiliated with the Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and African and African American Studies. He received my PhD from Yale University in 2022. Prior to my appointment here at UC Davis, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Mellon Sawyer "Visions of Slavery" Seminar at Emory University. He researches black literary and intellectual cultures, with a focus on the historiography of slavery and unfreedom. His work questions how black writers use fiction to redeem, rewrite and repurpose the history of black enslavement. His writing has been published in Journal of West Indian Literature, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Black Camera, and Comparative Literature.

He is currently working on my first manuscript, tentatively titled Slavery and Historical Imagination. This book quests after a single question: what does slavery mean as an idea about the past? Bringing together writers from around the Afro-Atlantic world, he tracks the operative function of slavery as a social, political, philosophical and historical idea.