Dr. Boyung Lee

Boyung Lee, a native of Korea, is Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, and professor of Practical Theology at Iliff School of Religion in Denver, Colorado. She is the first Korean American woman academic dean at the Association of Theological Schools in the Unites States and Canada. Prior to this position, for 15 years she taught at Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union where she became the first woman of color to receive a tenure in 2007. Her research and teaching interests include transnational practical theologies, intercultural/intereligious pedagogy, critical religious pedagogy and race, gender and sexuality, postcolonial/Asian/feminist theologies and pedagogies, and feminist theologies of the global South.

Supported Project:

Dr. K. Christine Pae, Dr. Nami Kim, and Dr. Boyung Lee, “Sexual Abuse and Korean American Christian Communities”

Acknowledging the complexities of tackling sexual abuse in Korean American communities, this project brings together Korean American scholars whose work and expertise have encompassed issues ranging from gendered violence, sexuality, race, immigration, and trauma in the fields of Christian studies. The scholars will critically engage one another’s work, aiming to produce an anthology that interrogates sexual violence in Korean American Protestant churches; maps out ethics of sex with cultural and religious sensitivities; fosters intergenerational dialogue among Korean American feminist scholars of Christianity; and challenges the continuously racialized gender-based sexual violence against Asian women. Our goals are not only to study sexual abuse, co-constitutive with spiritual abuse in the Korean American Christian community but also to create educationally effective materials to eradicate the abuse. For these, the project will interrogate gender-based violence and compulsory heterosexism in the communities while critically engaging both religious studies and theological studies on the matters related to pedagogy for healing sexual trauma, justice-oriented sexual ethics, homo/transphobia, and cross-racial/intergenerational/interfaith solidarity.