Steven Lee is the author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Cultures and World Revolution (Columbia UP, 2015), co-winner of the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies; and co-editor (with Amelia Glaser) of Comintern Aesthetics (University of Toronto Press, 2020), winner of the ACLA's René Wellek Prize.

Currently he is working on a book manuscript on the far left and far right in Northeast Asia in the years surrounding World War II, and the imprints of these ideologies on Asian American and Asian Anglophone writing.

He has been teaching at Berkeley since 2009, and is affiliated with the Asian American Research Center, the Center for Korean Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.