Faculty Bio

Veda Hyunjin Kim

Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Education

• Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst
• M.A., University of Chicago
• M.P.P., Seoul National University

About

Veda Hyunjin Kim, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He instructs sociology and criminology courses as a means of collective emancipation. With students, he strives to understand the social world critically and take conscious actions. His regular course offering includes Introductory Sociology, Social Theory, Cultural and Social Change, and Crime and Deviance.

He researches crimes of the powerful in modern history. His current book project delves into the genocidal formation of the criminal state of "South" Korea as an outcome of post-1945 US imperialism. The book also recognizes the genocide survivors' decolonial endeavors, wherein they appreciated life and death amongst each other as life and death of holistic human beings—life and death that matter, by contrast to the understanding during the genocide. This recognition serves as a postcolonial critique against the government-affiliated transitional justice programs incapable of redressing past violence. He is also working on article-length manuscripts on the criminological theory of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and on a new way of thinking about settler colonialism. Lastly, with N. Yasemin Bavbek, he is currently serving as the guest-editor for the special issue on "'Crises' and Historical Social Sciences" in Social Science History (to be published in 2025).