Dr. Minji Lee is a medievalist who specializes in the interactions between mysticism and medicine in the Middle Ages. Her Ph.D. thesis, “Bodies of Medieval Women as Dangerous, Liminal, and Holy: Medical and Religious Representations of Female Bodies in Hildegard of Bingen’s Causae et curae and Scivias” (Rice University 2018), explores how Hildegard of Bingen defended the female sexual/reproductive body as positive in the images of re-creation and salvation against the misogynic medieval and religious culture of her age. After completing a visiting scholarship in the Institute for Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Dr. Lee is now teaching in the Department of Religion and Medical Humanities Program at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Currently, she is researching the ways in which medieval European medical theories and modern Korean folk medicine allow women to maintain their reproductive health and to understand their own bodies in positive ways. Dr. Lee participated in making a Korean independent documentary project, “For Vagina’s Sake (2017)” that demonstrates how Western premodern medicine “diabolized” women’s menstrual bodies. She also volunteered at Reunion Institute to promote public awareness in religion.
