About

I am a cultural anthropologist 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 transnational circulations of medicinal ginseng––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.”

Before joining the UCI Anthropology faculty, I was an assistant professor at the University of Rochester (2007-2014), and editor of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures (2013-2014). I serve on the editorial boards of Anthropological Quarterly, the Journal of Korean Studies, and the Cornell University Press book series, The Environments of East Asia.

Research interests: transnational adoption, kinship and reproduction, nationalism, transnationalism, migration, diaspora, race/ethnicity, citizenship, personhood, social movements, expressive cultures, ethnographic media, borders/borderlands, political ecology, environmental anthropology, militarized ecologies, posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, STS, the Korean peninsula, Koreans in the world, Asians in the Americas

Ph.D., NYU, 2007

M.A., NYU, 2001, with Certificate in Culture and Media