Hyunhee Kim

I am a Ph. D candidate in cultural anthropology. My primary research interests intersect between legal anthropology and Asian American studies (with a particular focus on Korean Americans). My current and future research projects are diverse: 1) My dissertation examines Korean American lawyers’ citizenship project in post 9/11 New York City. Lawyers’ imagining and implementing citizenship projects which target Korean immigrants offer an opportunity to investigate the effects of US immigration law on the categorization of citizens and “aliens.” Through my dissertation, I will discuss the re/production of legality and illegality, racialization and immigration, professionalism and Christianity. 2) The fictions of Korean America: I attempt an anthropological reading of Korean American novels since the 1990s, written by the 1.5, in-between, generation. Korean American novels reveal those writers’ understandings of “il/legal” immigrants’ life courses and the racial hierarchy in the US and their claim to belonging to the U.S. through cultural production, 3) “Humanism” in science fiction: a “robot” is often used as the means to explore “humanity” in a somewhat idealized, but at the same time racialized and gendered manner. I hope to employ Asian American criticism on the presumed universality of “humanity” fraught with the misreading of different racial/ethnic groups.

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