Jaeeun Kim

Jaeeun Kim is a political sociologist and law and society scholar interested in questions of human mobility, inequality, power, and agency. She seeks to develop a relational, processual, and agentic account of categorization and identification, particularly in contexts in which such practices have significant implications for inequality at local, national, and global levels. Her research takes a transnational and global perspective, and systematically considers sending and transit contexts in studying international migration by adopting a multi-sited approach to research. 

Her work, generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Academy of Korean Studies, has been published in journals in sociological theory, law and society, race/ethnicity/migration, and historical sociology (please see her website for more information). Her first monograph, based on her award-winning dissertation (2013 Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association), was published at Stanford University Press in 2016 (paperback, 2020; Chinese translation 2023; please see below for more information about the book) and won three book prizes and one honorable mention from the American Sociological Association (ASA), the Social Science History Association (SSHA), and the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). 

• 2017 Thomas and Znaniecki Distinguished Book Award from the ASA International Migration Section
• 2017 Book Award on Asia/Transnational from the ASA Asia/Asian American Section
• 2017 Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award from SSHA
• 2018 James B. Palais Book Prize from AAS (Honorable Mention) 

Her recent article published in Sociological Theory, titled "Migration-Facilitating Capital: A Bourdieusian Theory of International Migration," also received the 2019 Theory Prize from the ASA Theory Section.  

She is currently working on her second book project about the asylum-seeking of unauthorized migrants on religious grounds, based on her ongoing multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork. Before joining the University of Michigan, she received her PhD degree from UCLA, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and Stanford, and taught at George Mason University for a year. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Science) in Princeton during 2016–2017, and a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berllin (Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin) during 2020–2021, where she will hold a non-resident permanent fellow position from 2024 to 2029.