Jinah Kim

Dr. Jinah Kim received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.  Her teaching and research focus on the histories and cultures of migration and contact between Asia and the Americas that are the legacies of modernity and war, and the migration of bodies, capital, representations and culture. Jinah’s courses seek to build student knowledge and facility with Cultural Studies, Global Asia Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Ethnic Studies. In her classes, students explore the narrative and visual media archive of the 20th and 21st centuries as a laboratory and field of investigation for modern identities, representations, theory and meaning.

Jinah is currently working on two book projects. Against Forgetting: Transpacific Organizing Against Gender Based Violence focuses on transpacific and intergenerational organizing against militarized gender-based violence. Second, along with Judy Ju Hui Han, Crystal Baik, and Young Gyung Paik, she is an editor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea (Duke UP), an anticolonial guide to Korea.

At CSUN Jinah is the director of the “Lee Yong Soo 'Comfort Women' Human Rights Research and Creative Activity Scholarship Fund,” (2022-2027) a five-year effort that will support faculty and student scholarship and creative activity on the history, legacy, and ongoing impact of the “comfort women” issue on contemporary society. She is the chair of the Faculty Senate's Educational Equity Committee.

Jinah also serves on the board for the Association for Asian American Studies, as an executive forum for Asian American Literature for the Modern Language Association, and as a member of the Board of Managing editors for American Quarterly.

EXTERNAL GRANTS

2021-2022 National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Award: "Against Forgetting: Transpacific Feminist Arts and Activism"
https://csunshinetoday.csun.edu/arts-and-culture/csun-prof-receives-neh-grant-for-book-on-comfort-women/

2020-2022 California Civil Liberties Grant, Co-PI: "World Remaking: Intergenerational Activism and Transformative Justice"
https://csunshinetoday.csun.edu/education/learning-lessons-from-the-incarceration-of-japanese-americans-to-improve-lives-of-asian-americans-today/

FELLOWSHIPS ESTABLISHED AT CSUN

2022-2027 “Lee Yong Soo Comfort Women Human Rights Scholarship Fund” https://csunshinetoday.csun.edu/university-news/csun-fellowship-to-support-scholarship-on-comfort-women/

PUBLICATIONS

MONOGRAPHS AND EDITED VOLUMES

Co-editor with Nitasha Sharma. Special Issue of Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies, Center-to-Center Relationalities: At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies, Volume 7, Issue 2, Fall 2021 (publication delayed to Summer 2022). 

Postcolonial Grief and the Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas. Duke University Press, January 2019. Reviewed by: American Literary History, Choice, Journal of World History, MELUS, Journal of Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Situations, Cultural Studies Review, Lateral, Society & Space

OTHER PUBLISHED WORKS

Jinah Kim. “Transpacific Noir: Literary Nuclear Entanglements,” Diaspora and Literary Studies, Angela Naimou ed.  Critical Concepts Series, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Spring 2023)

Jinah Kim and Nitasha Sharma.  “Center-to-Center Relationalities: At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies," Critical Ethnic Studies, Volume 7, Issue 2, July 2022.  

Jinah Kim. “Noir and History: An interview with Naomi Hirahara,” Hyphen, August 20, 2021. https://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2021/08/noir-and-history 

Jinah Kim. "Engaging the Ramseyer Controversy On Our Own Terms," Korea Policy Institute, February 24, 2021. https://www.kpolicy.org/post/the-abuse-of-history-a-brief-response-to-j-mark-ramseyer-s-contracting-for-sex-2

Jinah Kim. "The Insurgency of Mourning: Sewol across the Transpacific," Amerasia Journal, Vol 46, (Summer 2020): 84-100. www.tandfonline.com/loi/ramj20 

Jinah Kim, Interview for the New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/jinah-kim postcolonial-grief-the-afterlives-of-the-pacific-wars-in-the-americas-duke-up-2019/

Jinah Kim and Neda Atanososki. “Queer Desire and Subjectivity within Postmodern Geographies: Argentina and Hong Kong in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together.” American Quarterly, Vol. 71.3 (September 2017): 25-51. 

Jinah Kim. “Dismantling Privileged Settings: Japanese American Internees and Mexican “Braceros” at the Crossroads of WWII.” Transnational Crossroads: Reimagining Asian America, Latin@ America, and the American Pacific. Eds. Camila Fojas and Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr. University of Nebraska Press (2012): 191-224.

Jinah Kim. “Immigrants, Racial Citizens, and the (Multi)Cultural Politics of Neoliberal Los Angeles.” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order, Vol. 35.2 (2008): 36-56.