De-nin Lee

De-nin Deanna Lee is an art historian and specializes in the history of art in China. Most recently, she co-authored The History of Asian Art: A Global View (Thames & Hudson, 2023). She was also on the team that wrote The History of Art: A Global View (Thames & Hudson, 2021).

Her current research interest lay at the intersection of Chinese landscape and environmental concerns. She edited the anthology Eco-Art History in East and Southeast Asia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), and contributed an essay to Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective. Her Earth Day (April 22, 2022) contribution to the Norton Learning Blog can be read here.

Dr. Lee's book, The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll in Time (University of Washington Press, 2010), examines the long cultural life a Chinese handscroll painting from legends of its tenth-century origins in imperial visual desire and surveillance to textual interventions made by viewers through the centuries, which reveal painting as a technology for performing cultural identity.

Dr. Lee has contributed to anthologies and museum catalogs, including The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (Chinese University, 2010), A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (Blackwell, 2011), and China's Imperial Modern: The Painter's Craft (University of Alberta, 2012). Her work has also been published in Archives of Asian Art, Word & Image, Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Journal of Song-Yuan Studies. She has been the recipient of a NEH summer stipend and Fulbright Grant. Before coming to Emerson, she taught at Bowdoin College and Deep Springs College.