Xavier Lee

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

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

I am 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, I track the operative function of slavery as a social, political, philosophical and historical idea.