Assistant Professor of Growth and Structure of Cities Min Kyung Lee has been selected as a for the Penn Forum on Migration. She is the recipient of the 2021-2023 New Directions Fellowship funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her project is called "Mapping Wigs and Plywood: Korean Migration and the African American Urban Landscape." From her description:
"By focusing on Korea’s major export goods—wigs and plywood—I argue that the rapid economic development of Korea’s post-war period was linked to urban spaces occupied by African Americans, and accounts for the intra-racial contexts of place-making in commercial spaces."
Professor Lee's previous work has focused on mapping, geography, architecture, and urbanism. She was the 2020-2021 Banister Fletcher Global Fellow at the University of London- Institute of Paris, Queen Mary University and the Bartlett School of Architecture, with a monograph called The Tyranny of the Straight Line: Mapping Modern Paris.