Kyong-Jin Lee

Kyong-Jin Lee’s research bridges biblical interpretation, political theology, and continental philosophy to explore how scriptural imagination can illuminate the moral, political, and ecological crises of the present. Drawing on phenomenology, theology, and international political theory, her work examines how apocalyptic narratives, vulnerability, and embodiment shape the politics of climate change and global governance.

Raised in La Paz, Bolivia, Dr. Lee brings to her scholarship a deep interest in the lived intersections of faith, justice, and biblical theology. Her current book project, Flesh Made Earth: Political Theology at the Edge of the Anthropocene, develops an incarnational phenomenology of climate politics that reimagines vulnerability, intercorporeality, and hope amid planetary crisis. She is also writing the Interpretation Bible commentary on Esther and a scholarly monograph titled Rehabilitating Nehemiah: An Uncovering of Modern Political Thought (forthcoming with Mohr Siebeck).

Lee holds a PhD in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible from Yale University and an MLitt and PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews, along with an MSc in International Political Theory from the London School of Economics. Her interdisciplinary teaching and writing engage biblical texts alongside thinkers of phenomenology, biopolitics, and postcolonial theory to interrogate the theological and ontological foundations of contemporary political life.

Lee is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the Catholic Biblical Association, the Association for Political Theory, the International Studies Association, and the Political Theology Network.

She welcomes doctoral students interested in political-theological readings of the Old Testament and in the social, political, and theological dynamics of the global ecological crisis.