The City University of New York (CUNY) recently announced Nadia Kim as the Dr. Thomas Tam Visiting Professor for the 2018-19 academic year. Kim was chosen for her demonstrated scholarship and achievement in the transnational experiences of Asians and Asian Americans as they pertain to citizenship, race, gender, and community politics.
During her appointment, Kim will either teach a course or conduct a lecture series for the CUNY Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Sociology. She will also participate in public events designed to raise the visibility of scholarship in the sociology of Asian America and in Asian American Studies. This will include working closely with CUNY’s Asian American/Asian Research Institute, which promotes undergraduate and graduate education in Asian American Studies while also engaging civic, business, academic leaders and the general public in issues facing the Asian American community.
This distinctive position will provide Kim with the opportunity to draw from the ethnic and cultural diversity of New York City to enhance and complete her current book project, “We the Polluted People: Immigrants Remap Race, Class, Gender & the Body to Remake Citizenship” (under contract with Stanford University Press). This project examines how undocumented Latina/o and marginalized Asian immigrant activists in Los Angeles remake citizenship and forge a new kind of politics by emphasizing transnational perspectives, inequalities of the body, and gendered forms of community.
About the CUNY opportunity Kim states, “I’m honored and excited to share my research with a university on another coast in another global city that yet boasts different historical and demographic characteristics. Not only will it be generative for my own book project, but I’m humbled that the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Sociology as well as the Asian American/Asian Research Institute have entrusted me with engaging their intellectual community of faculty and students. I very much look forward to their feedback.”
Kim is also the author of “Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA,” which garnered two best book awards from the American Sociological Association in 2009.
