Daphne Lei
Associate Professor
Director, Multicultural Spring
Department of Drama, University of California, Irvine

Ph.D. Tufts University
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University

Other affiliations:
Executive Committee, American Society for Theatre Research. 2007-2010.
Nominating Committee member, American Society for Theatre Research. 2006- present.
Diversity Advisory Council member for Laguna Playhouse, 2007-present.
Advisory board member for Asian American Theatre Company (AATC). 2003- present.

Specialties: Asian and Asian American Theatre, Chinese Drama, Intercultural and Postcolonial Theatre, Ethnic, Gender, Diasporic and Transnational Studies

Lotus in the mud, border-crossers in the liminal space, colonial domination in a postcolonial state, intercultural performance with a postmodern mindset…. My intellectual interest is the contact zone, where conflicts occur and solutions are sought, where hybridity is nurtured or resisted, where multiplicity is analyzed and denied, where identity is challenged and performed.

I focus on intercultural exchanges along the Pacific Rim, especially interactions between Asians and Asian Americans and negotiations between Asian and non-Asian cultures.
Chinese opera is the chosen form of my investigation on all these issues. My recent book Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity Across the Pacific (Palgrave, 2006) is an investigation of Chinese opera and identity performance in various geographical and ideological contact zones. My current research project involves a study of identity performances provided by alternative Chinese opera in Chinese peripheries (Taiwan, Hong Kong and California). Chinese opera, like many traditional art forms, paradoxically provides both the safe haven for cultural purity and eternity as well as great flexibility in negotiating identity politics and cultural performances. With interdisciplinary approach to both the theatrical and paratheatrical aspects of Chinese opera, I believe my study carves out a new space in academic research in the field.

I have actively participated in the international discourse on performance and have published and presented works on traditional Chinese theatre, Asian American theatre, Chinese immigrant theatre and intercultural theatre, both in English and in Chinese. As a negotiator between cultures and languages, I also constantly engage in translation and interpretation projects related to Chinese opera on a transnational scale.

For more details about Daphne Lei, see Drama Arts at UCI