Jaeeun Kim

Jaeeun Kim was a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Walter H. Asia-Pacific Research Center for the 2012–13 academic year. Before coming to Stanford, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University for the 2011–12 academic year. She specializes in political sociology, ethnicity and nationalism, and international migration in East Asia and beyond, and is trained in comparative-historical and ethnographic methods.

During her time at Stanford, Kim set out to complete the manuscript of her first book based on her dissertation, entitled Colonial Migration and Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea. Drawing on archival and ethnographic data collected through 14 months of multi-sited field research in South Korea, Japan, and China, the dissertation analyzes diaspora politics in twentieth-century Korea, focusing on colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants to Japan and northeast China.

In addition, she is planning to further develop her second project on the migration careers, legalization strategies, and conversion patterns of ethnic Korean migrants from northeast China to the United States. The project examines the transpacific flows of people and religious faiths between East Asia and North America through the lens of the intersecting literatures on religion, migration, ethnicity, law, and transnationalism. She has completed ethnographic field research in Los Angeles, New York, and northeast China for this project.

Kim’s publications include articles in Theory and Society, Law and Social Inquiry, and European Journal of Sociology. She has been awarded various fellowships that support interdisciplinary and transnational research projects, including those from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Kim was born and grew up in Seoul, South Korea. She holds a BA in law (2001) and an MA in sociology (2003) from Seoul National University, and an MA (2006) and PhD (2011) in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. After completing her fellowship term at Stanford, she will be an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University, beginning in fall 2013.