Jessica J. Lee

Instructor & Writer
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Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of two books of nature writing: Turning (2017) and Two Trees Make a Forest (2019), shortlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Jessica has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review. She is a researcher at the University of Cambridge. 

Classes

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Stories

Cover Photo: An image of cabbage close up
What Cabbage Teaches Us about Care and Culture

It has been domesticated across Asia for so long, its movements have become opaque.

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Jessica J. Lee
Aug 19, 2021
Columns | Non Native Species
Cover Photo: An image of tea leaves in containers
Taking History Personally: Tea, Selfhood, and the Story of Empire

Tea plants—and the drinks we make from them—carry so many meanings.

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Jessica J. Lee
Jul 14, 2021
Columns | Non Native Species
Cover Photo: An image of seaweed floating in the water
How Seaweed Shapes Our Past and Future

What do we make of the weediness of seaweeds?

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Jessica J. Lee
Jun 24, 2021
Columns | Non Native Species
Cover Photo: An illustration of a hand opening a box—cherry blossoms flow out of the box. Ribbons of yellow, white, blue, fill the background.
Budding History: On Nationalism and Cherry Blossoms

Through myth-making and symbolism, the natural world comes to stand in for potent human ideals.

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Jessica J. Lee
Jul 23, 2020
Columns | Non Native Species
Cover Photo: A screenshot from Liziqi's YouTube video. On the table are purple potatoes, soy milk, steamed rice cakes, fruits, and flowers. An elderly Chinese woman sit as the table holding a spoon filled with some soy milk.
What Soybeans Can Be

Soybeans were linked to life itself.

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Jessica J. Lee
Jun 17, 2020
Columns | Non Native Species
Cover Photo: An illustration of woman holding a mango on her hands to the left side of the illustration. In the background is a mango tree. On the right is a building with a woman using picking pole to get the mangoes on the tree.
The Many Meanings of the Mango

Mangoes—revered and prized by almost every culture in which they are cultivated—are a migrant fruit.

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Jessica J. Lee
May 11, 2020
Columns | Non Native Species
Cover Photo: An image of heather on hill at sunset.
How the Literature of Empire Shaped My View of the Natural World

It took me years before I realized that I’d built my notions of beauty from the stories of a distant land.

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Jessica J. Lee
Apr 02, 2020
Columns | Non Native Species
Cover Photo: An image of a Fukien Tea Tree against a light pink background. On the right side of the tree we see the growth of green leaves. A white flower grows from a branch into the left, surrounded by branches.
My Grandfather and the Fukien Tea Tree: A Botanical History

I added it to the list of things off-limits: questions about the past, the wars, why my grandparents had fled China for Taiwan. Why eventually they left that place too.

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Jessica J. Lee
Feb 19, 2020
Columns | Non Native Species