2024-25 Traveling Fellow
Making, Erasing, and Researching Mental Health

Rachel will explore how nations, people, and cultures construct and preserve memory in the face of censorship. By delving into the power of free speech, she hopes to engage in advocacy, policy research, and explore the physicality of speech to both decipher how communities honor historical voices that no longer remain to speak, and to unravel how those communities uplift modern voices facing ongoing threats of suppression. She aims to consider the questions: How does resistance through freedom of speech, protest, and the press manifest depending on cultural backdrops? Where does free speech end and hate speech begin? How does the digital landscape reimagine speech? How do you lose a voice, and perhaps more urgently, how do you regain it? 

Rachel hopes to engage with legal scholars, artists, organizers, and community members to explore what role the right to voice has played across cultural and national landscapes.

Hometown: Brookline, MA
Majors: English and Human & Organizational Development

Rachel Lee (she/her) was born in Montreal, Canada but raised in Brookline, MA by her Korean immigrant parents. Her early experiences in student journalism, as well as exposure to her family’s history during the Korean Independence Movement, sparked her curiosity in global free expression. 

At Vanderbilt, Rachel majored in English Literary Studies and Human & Organizational Development, where she further explored her interest in constitutional rights. She joined The Future of Free Speech, a research collaboration between Vanderbilt University and Danish think tank, Justitia, as a Media Intern. By developing communications projects and working on research and advocacy support, Rachel had the opportunity to engage with and learn from a community of free speech scholars on modern issues of expression, from AI regulations on digital speech to developing laws on protest. Rachel also worked at PEN America as a Free Expression Fellow, focusing specifically on education policy and book bans. 

Outside of her involvement in free expression work, Rachel completed internships at Warner Bros. Discovery as a Communications Intern and at the Tennessee Justice Center, working as an Advocacy Intern within immigration and refugee-centered programming. On campus, she was a Vanderbilt Buchanan Library Fellow within the Exploring AI program, where she had the opportunity to develop educational video material for community usage on AI public concerns and fear mitigation. She was also Assistant Editor in Chief of Strike Magazine Nashville, an arts and fashion student publication.