Prof. Spencer Lee-Lenfield

I hope that I can share that your life path during college never need limit your life after, especially when it comes to languages! While in History and Literature as a Harvard undergrad from 2008–2012, I was in the Modern Europe field and mainly studied British and French material. But I also started Ancient Greek for fun as a junior, and that enabled me to spend 2012–15 in the United Kingdom at Oxford University reading for a second bachelor's degree in classics and philosophy on a Rhodes Scholarship. Taking breaks away from degree programs is also constructive: after Oxford, I worked for two years at Dumbarton Oaks, a beautiful research center in Washington, D.C., where I directed multiple video projects and worked on public relations and outreach initiatives. I then left in the summer of 2017 to take a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Korea, where I taught middle school English while studying Korean (which I'd started in 2015). From 2018–24, I was a Ph.D. student in Yale's Department of Comparative Literature, where I wrote a dissertation on translation, adaptation, and retelling between Korean and Korean diasporic literature. Sidelines are also great: from my undergraduate years to the end of graduate school, I also wrote on a regular basis as a freelance journalist, essayist, and reviewer on the side. In 2024, Harvard's Department of Comparative Literature hired me as a professor, which means my office is now in Dana Palmer House just across from Hist & Lit. Please come anytime to talk about career paths, ideas, languages, or books!