About

I am a cultural anthropologist and award-winning author whose research and writing are organized around core anthropological concerns with nature and culture and the biological and the social in the production of personhood and social value. In my past and ongoing projects––which include transnational adoption from South Korea, the ecologies of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), and the materialization of smell and olfactory experience––I seek out the particular ways in which conceptions of the nation, personhood, politics, and human/non-human relations are performatively and discursively made and remade through cases that confound everyday assumptions about what is “natural” or “cultural.”

I received both my M.A. (with a Certificate in Culture and Media) and Ph.D. from New York University. In 2006, I was a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Literatures. Before joining the UCI Anthropology faculty, I was an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester (2007-2014), and editor of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures (2013-2014). I currently serve as past president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the Director of Graduate Admissions in the UCI Anthropology Department. My books, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoption and the Politics of Belonging (2010) and Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ (2022), were both published by Duke University Press. Both were awarded the James B. Palais Prize in Korean Studies from the Association for Asian Studies, and Adopted Territory also received the Association of Asian American Studies Social Science book award. The co-edited volume, Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (with David Fedman and Albert Park) was published by Cornell University Press in 2023.

I can be reached at eleanak at uci dot edu.

My first name is pronounced /ǝ-leena/.