About

Sharon J. Yoon is assistant professor of Korean studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is affiliated with the Keough School’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. She earned her PhD in sociology from Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College.

Yoon is an ethnographer who has spent many years conducting in-depth fieldwork in Korean diasporic communities in Seoul, Beijing, and Osaka. Her first book, The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography of Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing’s Koreatown (Oxford University Press, 2020), analyzes how the rise of transnationalism has affected the social and economic lives of Korean migrants searching for wealth and stability in Beijing’s Korean enclave. Her second book is based on seven years of participant observation, following the lives of postcolonial Korean (“zainichi”) social activists who sought to outlaw the surge of extremist hate parades targeting the Koreatown in Osaka between 2013 and 2015.