How Summer Kim Lee and Uri McMillan help students connect with theory, history and expression

Sean Brenner | September 3, 2025

Summer Kim Lee and Uri McMillan are challenging their students’ conceptions of theory, expression and performance, one classroom discussion at a time.

Drawing from their backgrounds in performance studies, the UCLA English professors encourage their students to find relevance in writing and performance whether the material is from 2025 or decades ago.

In this conversation, the two faculty members reflect on a few of their teaching strategies, such as staging debates, encountering historical texts or using contemporary pop culture as a bridge to theory. They also share how they aim to build critical skills for the real world.

Both are the authors of books being published in October 2025 by Duke University Press: Lee’s “Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair” and McMillan’s “Mavericks of Style: The Seventies in Color.”

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Uri McMillan: I think Summer and I kind of teach in a similar way. I like to give students a concrete concept and then show them different ways to interpret it. So when I bring in an older piece of writing, I might stage a debate and ask them, “Okay, what’s your interpretation of this? Do you agree with the older view or the new one?”

For example, both of us teach Peggy Phelan’s “Unmarked,” a foundational performance studies text. I’ll ask, “Do you think performance only exists in the present moment? Or does it persist afterward?” Usually, everyone leans toward the latter, but the exercise gets them invested. You kind of have to trick them into caring sometimes.

Summer Kim Lee: When we teach performance theory or theory in general, it shifts how we view historical time. You want students to see how the stakes of a concept change as it moves through time. Even contemporary work needs to be historicized.

I taught a seminar on negative affect — bad feelings in queer and feminist theory — and a big part of that was explaining how much of that theory came out of the need to better understand and give language to one’s personal experience in the context of, for example, the women’s movement and the AIDS crisis.

These feelings of grief, anger, mourning: They aren’t just abstract, nor are they only private and individualized. They’re grounded in real, historical moments of frustration and devastation and can be collectively transmitted and felt.

We’re introducing them to theory and history, but they’re teaching us how they see and move through the world. That makes the classroom feel dynamic and alive.

McMillan: I agree. I often find myself explaining how the language we use now around gender and sexuality didn’t exist in the same way in the ’90s. Sometimes students want to critique older writing for kind of being outdated. But I think particularly when you’re talking about things like gender and sexuality, the language from a few decades ago doesn’t necessarily match our present-day reality.  

Like when we watch “Paris is Burning,” I need to explain that the way we talk about gender identity today is pretty new. That helps students understand that the people in that film were navigating identity without the vocabulary we have now — and they need to approach that with generosity, not judgment.

Lee: That’s a film we both revisited in our teaching recently. It used to be everywhere in performance and queer studies, but it started disappearing from syllabi. Maybe because of the controversies around it, or maybe people assumed students had seen it.

One time, I asked my class, “How many of you have watched the full film?” and only a quarter raised their hands. They knew of it, maybe from TikTok or “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” but they hadn’t seen the whole work.

McMillan: That’s such a good example of a larger issue: Students today often come in having consumed pieces of something through pop culture or social media, but not the whole text. And that actually opens up an opportunity for us as teachers. We’re not just introducing theory or concepts; we’re introducing them to artists, films and histories they wouldn’t otherwise know.

Lee: It’s a challenge, but also fun.

I think about how students’ everyday media habits — whether on TikTok or elsewhere — can be used and addressed in class, and importantly not in a judgmental, moralizing way. I ask students, “What specifically do you like to watch?” “How does it relate to performance?” “What does it say about how you see the world and move through it?” “How can your own habits, tastes and interests become something that you analyze in class — and how could they find a place in your critical writing related to the theories we’re discussing in class?”

I tell students, “You might not get all of this now, and that’s OK. But maybe five years from now, this concept will come back to you when you need it.”

In a class I taught called “L.A. Women,” I had students make annotated playlists built around a theme drawn from readings and course topics. I asked them to move beyond the algorithm to find something new, and to also incorporate what they like listening to on their own time.

One student, taking into consideration how we read about women in traffic or on the freeway — like in Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays” and Karen Tei Yamashita’s “Tropic of Orange”— made a playlist about her commute, with songs that mapped out different parts of her drive to and from campus. She was able to think differently, and creatively, about what otherwise is so quotidian and routine. And I got to learn about music I’m too old to know about. [Laughs.]

We’re introducing them to theory and history, but they’re teaching us how they see and move through the world. That makes the classroom feel dynamic and alive.

McMillan: I also do keywords with them sometimes. I’ll have them choose a keyword — something they think might be an important concept — and then they have to provide examples on social media of what that concept is. So I learn a lot from that.

Lee: I really like that idea!

McMillan: I want students to see theory not as abstract or academic, but as a strategy for everyday living. I organize my classes around concepts — like “affect,” for example — and tell students, “You might not get all of this now, and that’s OK. But maybe five years from now, this concept will come back to you when you need it.”

Lee: That’s how I try to frame things, too. I want them to understand that even if you don’t “get” all of this right now, you will probably continue returning to this or wanting to reread it at some point. And that’s totally how it should move through your mind and through your life.