Kyonghee Lee studied philosophy, sinology, and intellectual history in Seoul, Munich, and Heidelberg. For her PhD, she investigated the reception and domestication of the community compact (hyang’yak), a Song Chinese invention for the organization and behavioral improvement of local populations, by Chosŏn Koreans. Instead of using the binary of government and autonomy for the analysis of this historical form of community organization, she identified Confucian ritualism as the frame of reference for its historical initiators. Currently, she works on the movement and transformation of agricultural knowledge into and within fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Korea.