Margaret C. Lee is Associate Professor of African Studies in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC- Chapel Hill). Prior to coming to UNC, Lee was a Visiting Scholar with the African Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced and International Studies at Johns Hopkins University (Washington, DC). She has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, American University (Washington, DC), Spelman College (Georgia), and Tennessee Technological University. Lee has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oslo (Norway) and a Research Fellow at the Africa Institute of South Africa (Pretoria). Between 2002 and 2008, Lee was an adjunct faculty member with the African Center for Strategic Studies of the National Defense University in Washington, DC.
Lee has served as a consultant to the Council on Foreign Relations, the US Department of Education, and USAID. She is the author of The Political Economy of Regionalism in Southern Africa (2003) and SADCC: The Political Economy of Development in Southern Africa (1989); and co-editor of Unfinished Business: The Land Crisis in Southern Africa (2003) and The State and Democracy in Africa (1997, 1998). In addition she has published numerous journal articles, chapters in books, occasional papers, etc.
Lee has received research support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (New York) and since 2003 has been an advisor to a Guggenheim project designed to train the next generation of political scientists on the African continent. She has lectured widely, both in the United States and abroad on various topics related to her research on the political economy of Africa.
Currently, Lee is working on a book manuscript entitled “Trading Stories: Africa’s World Markets,” which has been commissioned by the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden. She has received a generous research grant from the Nordic Africa Institute, the African Studies Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, as well as a UNC-Chapel Hill Carver Grant. Most recently Lee was a John L. Turner Fellow with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC-Chapel Hill.