Seung-joon Lee

During the fellowship year at CASBS, Seung-joon Lee will complete his second book, Revolutions at the Canteens: Dietary Energy and the Politics of Canteen Meals in Industrial China. This work, which places food at the core of the paradigm shift in energy and labor history, will delve into one of the intriguing puzzles of China’s industrialization that belatedly and yet rapidly unfolded in the twentieth century. In industrial China, fossil fuel energy, while indispensable, appeared more deficient and dependent; instead, labor and dietary energy stored in laborers’ muscles mattered more. Lee’s research will illuminate how the rise of a strictly calorie-based understanding of food as dietary energy, which blossomed well before the PRC’s founding in 1949, more bequeathed to, rather than repudiated by, the Communists even after the 1949 regime change. Furthermore, it helped legitimize, albeit unintentionally, Mao’s coercive industrial labor mobilization.  

Lee is teaching modern Chinese history as an associate professor at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Gourmets in the Land of Famine (Stanford University Press, 2011). His research has been awarded Harvard-Yenching Visiting Scholarship, Jing Brand Scholarship of Needham Research Institute, and Residential Fellowship of National Humanities Center. He is a National University of Singapore Fellow for 2024-25.