Kris Hyesoo Lee

Kris Hyesoo Lee is a Senior Research Associate at the Bridging Divides program at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), where she works on Employment and Lifelong Education theme. Her research examines the intersections of education, migration, and mobility, with a particular focus on how changing migration infrastructures and migration regimes influence study-to-work transitions and skilled forms of mobility.

Prior to joining Bridging divides program, she was a Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, where she contributed to the Belt and Road Initiative and Student-Mobilities in China–Southeast Asia (BRISM) project. In this role, she explored how China’s BRI is (re)shaping knowledge spaces and mobility circuits, and how young people navigate changing education-migration landscapes, aspirations, and mobility regimes across Southeast Asia and China.

Kris holds a DPhil in Human Geography from the University of Oxford.

Selected publications

Lee, KH. (2025). Desire and the Making of the Mobile Subject: China as Destination for International Students from the West, Globalisation, Societies and Education

Lee, KH. (2020). Becoming a bona fide Cosmopolitan: Unpacking the Narratives of Western-situated International Students in China, Social and Cultural Geography

Lee, KH. (2020). “I Post, therefore I Become #cosmopolitan”: The Materiality of Online-Representations of Study Abroad in China, Population, Space and Place