Faculty

Profile

Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar and new media artist with wide-ranging interests in the areas of ethnic, cultural, queer and feminist media studies, poetics, and creative practice. 

Rhee’s debut poetry collection, “Love, Robot,” was published in 2017 and has been named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association. She is also author of the poetry chapbooks “Yellow” and “Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love.” Other works in progress or completed include The Watermelon Woman under contract at McGill University Press. Her  monograph titled, “Machine Dreams: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body,” a scholarly study of robots, media and race, and “Poetry Machines,” a collection of lyrical essays on poetry and technology are currently under contract at Duke University Press.

As a new media artist, her current social practice installation The Afro-Asian Poetic Pantry addresses anti-Black and anti-Asian violence in NYC through poetry and honoring solidarity and is on view in the Fall of 2023 at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) Abolition House on Govenor’s Island. Her project The Kimchi Poetry Machine is exhibited at the Electronic Literature Review Volume III and included in the anthology Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change (Routledge, 2022). From 2008 - 2018, with collaborators from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, she co-lead the participatory project From the Center which focused on digital storytelling, women of color, and HIV/AIDS education in the San Francisco Jail. Research, exhibitions, and awards for this project include the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Public Service, the Yamashita Prize for Social Change, and collaboratively written publications in Feminist Cyberspaces: Pedagogies in Transition, AIDS and the Distribution of Crisis, and Sexuality Research and Social Policy. 

At The New School, Rhee teaches courses in the School of Media Studies, and the Creative Writing MFA. Prior to The New School, Rhee held appointments at the University at Buffalo--SUNY, Harvard University, University of California, Los Angeles, Cornell College, and the University of Oregon. Rhee earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in ethnic studies with a Designated Emphasis in new media studies, and her B.A. in Creative Writing and English from the University of Southern California. 

Currently, Rhee co-leads the Palah 파랗 Light Lab a media lab which fosters poetry, participation and pedagogy through technology, queer feminism, and equity. www.palahlightlab.org

For advisement, she welcomes students in the following areas: queer and feminist new media theory, robotic art, Asian and Asian American Studies, Afro-Asian studies, queer, and feminist film, AIDS, abolition, and incarceration, poetry, science fiction, art criticism, and electronic literature.

Photo Credit: Zohreh Zadbood