Sunmin Kim

|Assistant Professor

Academic Appointments

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

Sunmin Kim is primarily interested in bringing insights from sociology of culture and knowledge into the studies of race and immigration in the United States.

Kim is currently working on a book manuscript that looks at how American social scientists and federal bureaucrats attempted to study immigrants in the early twentieth century, and how such attempts led to the re-invention of the principles of boundary-making around the American nation. To answer these questions, Kim is analyzing archival materials related to the Dillingham Commission Report (1911) – the most comprehensive study of immigrants ever undertaken by the federal government.

In his other projects, Kim works on the technology of racial governance within the Japanese internment camps during World War II; political incorporation of immigrants and their children in New York City; varying cultural criteria of defining "foreigners" in developed countries; political participation of minorities; policy preferences of Asian Americans; guidelines for gathering and analyzing archival data; the National Archive files of early 20th century Korean immigrants; and the relationship between democracy and public opinion polling in East Asia. In addition to his Ph.D. in sociology from University of California, Berkeley, Kim received B.A. and M.A. in sociology from Seoul National University.

He teaches courses on contemporary social theory (SOCY 16: Cosntructing Social Theory), immigration (SOCY 48: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity), race and power in the United States (SOCY 76: Race, Politics, and Power), and the social history of quantification (SOCY 77: The Power of Numbers: How Data and Algorithms Shape the World).

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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

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
Kim, Sunmin and Taeku Lee. 2024. "Making Opinions Public: Polling and Democratic Responsiveness in South Korea." Politics and Society 52(4): 515-546. Link.
Kim, Sunmin. 2023. "Edward A. Ross." (Presidential Biography in the American Sociological Association Website) Link

Kim, Sunmin. 2023. "Heterogeneity in "Asian American." Footnotes 51(3). Link
Kim, Sunmin. 2021. "Fault Lines among Asian Americans: Convergence and Divergence in Policy Opinions." RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of Social Sciences 7(2): 46-67 Link
Lara-Milan, Armando, Brian Sargent, and Sunmin Kim. 2020. "Theorizing with Archives: Contingency, Mistakes, and Plausible Alternatives." Qualitative Sociology 43(3): 345-365. Link
Kim, Sunmin. 2019. "Rethinking Models of Minority Political Participation: Inter- and Intra-group Variation in Political "Styles." The Du Bois Review: Social Science Research On Race 16(2): 489-510. Link
Lara-Milan, Armando, Brian Sargent, and Sunmin Kim. 2019. "Where is the Archive in Historical Sociology? The Case for Ethnographic Dispositions." Trajectories 30. Link
Lee, Taeku, and Sunmin Kim. 2018. "The Mechanics of Immigration Polls: A Review." Public Opinion Quarterly 82(1):148-170. Link

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Works In Progress

The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth Century Immigration Debate, The University of Chicago Press (forthcoming in 2025).
"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)
"Teaching Asian American Studies through the History of Student Mobilization" (with Daniel Lin '23) (under review)
"From Cultural Sociology to Political Sociology: Understanding the Late Works of Pierre Bourdieu." (invited for submission to the special issue of Korean Journal of Sociology on Pierre Bourdieu)(in Korean)
"Efficacy of Facts-Based Advocacy: Immigration Politics Past and Present." (invited for submission to the 50th-year anniversary issue of Social Science History)
A Laboratory of Racial Governance: Engineering Inclusion in the Japanese Internment Camps (Book project in preparation)

Selected Works & Activities

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

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