Lee, Young-Joo

I was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. As an undergraduate, I majored in English Language and Literature at Yonsei University in Seoul. I came to the United States to study Communication at Purdue University and later studied Library and Information Science at Simmons University.

My first library job was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, where the most enjoyable part of my work was exchanging exhibition catalogs with hundreds of museums around the world. Since then, I have worked in many different types of libraries. As a clinical librarian at Howard University College of Medicine, I supported the scholarly activities of residents, fellows, and clinicians and held a faculty appointment in the Department of Ophthalmology. Prior to joining George Mason University Libraries in fall 2023, I was a data librarian at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where I taught researchers how to find secondary data and how to manage and use clinical and public health data ethically.

• Master of Science (MS) in Library and Information Science, Simmons University, Boston, Massachusetts
• Master of Arts (MA) in Communication, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
• Bachelor of Arts (BA) in English Language and Literature, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea

I serve as the Cultural Studies and Psychology Librarian at Mason Libraries, providing liaison services to African and African American Studies, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Psychology, and Sociology. I offer research consultations, teach library instruction sessions, develop research guides, and build collections that support teaching and research in these fields.

I am also pursuing a PhD in Sociology at George Mason University. My research interests include Korean society and culture, gender, collective memory, and urban inequality. I also work with digital archives and publicly available online data, such as YouTube content. My current projects examine the Itaewon crowd crush and its memorial archives, semi-basement and other substandard housing in Seoul, and the gendered dimensions of South Korean population policy. I specialize in qualitative data analysis and have presented my research at national and international conferences.