Kangsan Lee

Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Korea University, South Korea

Kangsan Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Korea University, South Korea. Before joining Korea University, Lee was an Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy and Business, Organizations, and Society at New York University Abu Dhabi and a Global Network Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University.

His research examines how value and meaning are created, transformed, and contested across cultural and economic domains, especially during periods of global transformation. Trained as a sociologist of culture and economic life, his work bridges economic sociology, the sociology of art, and computational social science to explore how institutions and individuals construct value in creative and financial markets, including the art world and cryptocurrency ecosystems. His research has appeared in Social Forces, Science Advances, Nature: Scientific Reports, Poetics, Journal of International Money and Finance, Socius, Stanford University Press, Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology, and the Elgar Encyclopedia of Organizational Sociology. He is currently developing a transfer learning framework to address global data disparities in art market research.

Lee’s recent paper, “Migrating arts with (out) migrating artists: Decentering the global art world” (with Peggy Levitt and Chantal Valdivia-Moreno), introduces the concept of “decentering” to describe new forms of cultural globalization that occur within and between peripheries, rather than through traditional metropolitan centers. By tracing the circulation of artists from Argentina, Lebanon, and South Korea, this work highlights how artistic mobility, vernacular translation, and categorical labeling foster more polycentric and interconnected global art worlds.

Lee’s work has been supported by the Buffett Institute for International Studies (Northwestern University), the American Assembly (Columbia University), and the Office of Research (Zayed University). Beyond academia, he contributes to public discourse on technology, culture, and value—appearing as an invited expert on SkyNews Arabia, the MIT Enterprise Forum, Startup India (Government of India), and CultureSTATS (Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi). He also serves on the advisory board of Maan, the Authority of Social Contribution, Government of the United Arab Emirates.

Website: https://www.kangsanlee.net