Professor Lee is currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Global Dialogue and UNISA. She has been a member of the faculty at the University of Chapel Hill since 2006. Professor Lee has taught at Johns Hopkins. Professor Lee has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, American University, Spelman College, and Tennessee Technological University. Professor Lee has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oslo (Norway) and a Research Fellow at the Africa Institute of South Africa (Pretoria). Between 2002 and 2008, Dr. Lee was an adjunct faculty with the African Center for Strategic Studies of the National Defense University in Washington, DC.

Professor Lee has served as a consultant to the Council on Foreign Relations, the US Department of Education, and USAID. She is the author of The Political Economy of Regionalism in Southern Africa(2003) and SADCC: The Political Economy of Development in Southern Africa (1989); and co-editor of Unfinished Business: The Land Crisis in Southern Africa (2003) and The State and Democracy in Africa (1997, 1998). In addition she has published numerous journal articles, chapters in books, occasional papers, etc.

Dr. Lee has received research support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (New York) and from 2003 to 2013 was an advisor to a Guggenheim project designed to train the next generation of African scholars. She has lectured widely, both in the United States and abroad on various topics related to her research on the political economy of Africa.

Professor Lee’s most recent book is Africa’s World Trade: Informal Economies and Globalization from Below.