Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow of History
Email: hrlee@mit.edu
Heather received her Ph.D. from Brown University in American Studies in May 2014 and is currently the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. She will join NYU Shanghai as an Assistant Professor of Global China Studies in fall 2016. Her book project tells the social history of Chinese restaurants through a case study of New York. She studies the historical transformation of Chinese restaurants in the United States from an enclave business into one of the largest mass consumer industries. Blending archival research with quantitative and spatial analyses, this project tells the story of how the Chinese developed a system for shutting capital and labor across the Pacific that accounts for the Chinese restaurant industry's rapid growth in the early twentieth century. Alongside this research, Heather is developing a historical database of Chinese restaurants, which she will make publicly available through an interactive digital platform on Chinese migration. She has published articles on transnational Asian American history and U.S. Consumer history, as well as worked with museums and historical societies on public exhibits.