Sunmin Kim

|Assistant Professor
Academic Appointments

  • Assistant Professor of Sociology

  • Faculty associate, The Dartmouth Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality (RMS)

As a sociologist, I am primarily interested in examining the nexus between race, immigration, and national belonging through the lens of knowledge production. While often understood as self-evident, categories such as race, ethnicity, and citizenship are socially constructed through the work of social scientists, government officials, and activists. These actors engage in a collective intellectual endeavor to define who is regarded as different from whom and how they should be treated. Employing archival work, survey analysis, and in-depth interviews, I study how their work manifests in different domains, such as the social sciences, immigration law, public opinion, and electoral politics.  

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View Curriculum Vitae

Contact

Sunmin.Kim@dartmouth.edu
Blunt Alum Ctr, Room 301D
HB 6104

Education

  • B.A. Seoul National University
  • M.A. Seoul National University
  • M.A. University of California, Berkeley
  • Ph. D. University of California, Berkley

Selected Publications

  • Kim, Sunmin. 2025. The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth Century Immigration Debate. The University of Chicago Press. (forthcoming) Link 

  • Kim, Sunmin, and Daniel Lin. 2025. "Collective Past as a Community-building Initiative: Teaching Asian American Studies through the History of Student Activism." (forthcoming in Journal of Asian American Studies)

  • Choi, Carolyn, and Sunmin Kim. 2024. "Category Traversing: Early Korean Immigrants Eluding the U.S. State." Ethnic and Racial Studies. Link.

  • Kim, Sunmin. 2024. "Blinded by the Facts: Unintended Consequences of Racial Knowledge Production in the Dillingham Commission (1907-1911)." Theory and Society 53(2): 425-464. Link

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Works In Progress

  • A Laboratory of Racial Governance: Engineering Inclusion in the World War II Japanese Concentration Camps (Book project in preparation)

  • "Efficacy of Facts-Based Advocacy: Immigration Politics Past and Present." (under review for the 50th-year anniversary issue of Social Science History)

  • "From Cultural Sociology to Political Sociology: Understanding the Late Works of Pierre Bourdieu." (under review for the special issue of Korean Journal of Sociology on Pierre Bourdieu)(in Korean)

  • "Assimilation in Market and Politics: Exit and Voice for Children of Imimgrants." 

  • "Quantifying the Inscrutable: The Question of Japanese American Loyalty During the Internment" (with Hyunsik Chun)

  • "Boundary-Making across 22-OECD Countries: A Multi-Level Latent Class Approach" (with Inkwan Chung)

  • "The Heterogeneity among Asian Americans" (with Nolan Yee '25)

Selected Works & Activities

"Asian American Student Activism at Dartmouth College" (a student web exhibit from SOCY 76 Winter 2023: Race, Power, and Politics) Link

  • The Unruly Facts of Race

Courses