Christina Lee, professor of Spanish and Portuguese, has been named Acting Chair of the Humanities Council, effective July 1, 2025. She will serve in place of Esther Schor (English), who will be on sabbatical for the academic year 2025-26.
“The Humanities Council is fortunate that Professor Christina Lee has agreed to serve as Acting Chair during the coming academic year, when I am on leave,” said Schor. “Christina brings a wealth of experience as a member of the Council’s Executive Committee, and from her deep engagement in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Program in Latin American Studies, the Center for Culture, Religion, and Society, and the Council’s Committee on Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, where she is currently Acting Chair.”
Lee’s research focuses on the literary, social, and cultural productions of Iberian Spain and the Spanish Transpacific during the early modern period. Her most recent book, “Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule,” examines the lives and interactions of popular saints and their devotees in the Spanish Philippines from the 16th to the early 18th century.
She is also the author of “The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain” and editor of the collection of essays “Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age.” She is co-editor of the two volumes of “The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources,” “Reading and Writing Subjects in Medieval and Golden Age Spain,” and co-editor of the global history book series “Connected Histories in the Early Modern World.”
“I am honored to be briefly stepping into the leadership of the Council while Starry takes a well-deserved sabbatical. I have been impressed and humbled by the commitment of my colleagues in the humanities to their research, teaching, and public service, and will do my best to sustain their success in the forthcoming year,” said Lee. “In these difficult times, I am more convinced than ever that it is only through the deep examination of human expressions that we can truly understand and meaningfully engage with our local, national, and global challenges.”
In 2022, Lee and Cristina Martinez-Juan (SOAS University of London) received a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a project titled “The Library of the Convent of San Pablo (Manila, 1762)” which digitally repatriates a collection of more than 1,000 rare manuscripts, maps, and early printed materials that were taken by the British in the 18th century from the Convent of San Pablo in Manila, Philippines. The grant was abruptly cancelled this month in a wave of cuts by the current presidential administration, but it will be supported by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese through the project’s completion.
She graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Latin American Literature. She earned a Ph.D. from Princeton in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Before returning to Princeton to join the faculty in 2007, Lee taught at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, San Jose State University, and Connecticut College.
As Acting Chair of the Humanities Council, she will moderate the Council’s 19th annual Humanities Colloquium on Thursday, September 11, 2025 at 4:30 pm in the Chancellor Green Rotunda.
