Jim Lee received his Ph.D. in English, as well as an M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA, and his B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to UCSB, he served as Assistant Professor of English and Associate Director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jim's book, Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism, was published in 2004 by the University of Minnesota Press. He has also published articles in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Literary Studies East and West, A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, African American Writers, Amerasia, The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture, and Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook.

At UCSB, Jim sits on the Advisory Board of a special project of the Critical Issues in America series titled "Race, Space, and Power," organized by Professors George Lipsitz and Clyde Woods. He is also a special consultant for a project sponsored by the Institute for Signifying Scriptures at the Claremont Graduate University. Titled "Ethnologies of Scriptural Readings in the United States," this multi-year project investigates how fundamentalist understandings and approaches to religious texts impact U.S. communities of color.

Jim serves as an editor for the Heath Anthology of American Literature (Houghton Mifflin), and is a former book review editor for Amerasia Journal. He is currently serving as an associate editor for American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association. He is also serving a three-year term as an elected member of the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association. He was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow from 2000-2.

For the 2007-8 academic year, Jim will teach courses in Asian American literature, a class on theories and methods in Asian American Studies, and a graduate seminar in critical issues in the field.