Professor Haiyan Lee

Haiyan Lee is the Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities. She was educated at Peking University, University of Chicago, and Cornell University. She has been teaching about happiness at Stanford for many years. Lee’s  first book, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950, is a critical genealogy of the idea of “love” (qing) in modern Chinese literary and cultural history. It is the first recipient of the Joseph Levenson Prize in the field of modern Chinese literature. Her second book, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, examines how the figure of “the stranger”—foreigner, migrant, class enemy, woman, animal, ghost—in Chinese fiction, film, television, and exhibition culture tests the moral limits of a society known for the primacy of consanguinity and familiarity. Her newest book, A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination, investigates Chinese visions of “justice” at the intersection of narrative, law, and ethics.