MECHANICAL
STREAM
S.LEE is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, where he teaches and writes about literature, aesthetics, and critical theory. His research centers on contemporary fiction, urbanism, architecture, and social class—examining how space and environment become coded mechanisms of identity, and how cultural production operates as both mirror and machine of these dynamics.
He is the author of Kitchen Sink Aesthetics, which frames British kitchen sink realism as a blueprint for spatialized class expression, and the editor of Locating Classed Subjectivities, a volume tracking the sediment of class across three centuries of cultural form. His essays, chapters, and public-facing criticism—including work for The Los Angeles Review of Books—extend these lines of inquiry into a new conceptual terrain.
Recent courses include “The (New) British Novel),” “Nostalgia in British Fiction,” “Working-Class Literature,” “British Social Realism,” and “British Horror Fiction.” He has also developed single-author seminars on writers like Zadie Smith, J.G. Ballard, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Forthcoming projects map aesthetic and class flows across literary, visual, and performance cultures: a monograph on nostalgia; a second on representations of class in contemporary media; a third on esoteric performance art; and an article on cognitive load theory—specifically precarity viewed through narrative and affective formations.
He splits his time between Austin and Los Angeles.