Sunghoon Lee

Sunghoon Lee is a historian of global early modern art whose research and teaching encompass early modern European empires and their colonial arts, print culture and the history of the book, and cartographic imagination and representation. His first book project, “Escala: Art, Scale, and Geographic Distance in the Colonial Philippines,” analyzes works created by European colonizers and Indigenous peoples in the Philippines, the Spanish Empire’s most remote outpost. Lee argues that these transcultural objects register a nascent awareness of the Pacific’s immensity, adopting scale as his principal heuristic to reconstruct early modern responses to transpacific material culture. A second project investigates how artists in Europe and the Americas visualized early modern aspirations for American mineral wealth, especially copper. Before he joined the University of Georgia, Lee served as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and held a Kress Fellowship at the Bibliotheca Hertziana—Max Planck Institute for Art History. He earned his PhD in History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Research Focus: Global Early Modern, Southern Renaissance and Baroque Art, Colonial Latin American and Philippine Art.