Sharon Yoon is associate professor of Korean studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs. She is a qualitative sociologist who studies marginalized communities in East Asia, specializing in global and transnational sociology; race, ethnicity, and migration; and economic sociology. She has been a Kellogg faculty fellow since 2024.
Yoon 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 research has appeared in such journals as the International Journal of Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Korean Journal of Sociology, among others.
Yoon has worked with think tanks such as the Korea Economic Institute and the Asian Institute for Policy Studies, local grassroots organizations such as the Korea NGO Center and the Center for Multiethnic Human Rights Education in Osaka, and mainstream media outlets such as NPR and KBS World Radio.
Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Blakemore-Freeman Foundation, the Korea Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Japan-United States Friendship Commission.
Yoon holds a PhD in sociology from Princeton University.