Biography

Jooyoung Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He is also a senior fellow in the Yale University Urban Ethnography Project, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. Lee’s work examines how gun violence shapes African American communities across the United States. His first book, Blowin Up: Rap Dreams in South Central (University of Chicago Press, 2016), is a long-term ethnographic study of young Black men who see Hip Hop as a way out of the gang life in Los Angeles. His second book, Ricochet (under contract with University of Chicago press), examines PTSD and disability amongst gunshot survivors in Philadelphia. In addition to these books, Lee is also working on a long-term project on the methodological uses of videos and is doing the research for a third book on unsolved serial homicide cases. His work has been funded by the NIMH, SSHRC, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Lee taught an American Studies course on Gun Violence in the Summer of 2017, and he was one of the two CSUS Bissell-Heyd Research Fellows in 2016-17.