about

I am an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and a core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. 

My scholarship is animated by concerns with how modern states develop capacity to define people at the edges of respectable society, constructing what it means to be illicit, marginal, and deviant. My research and teaching crosses disciplinary boundaries between political science and history, with area focus on Southeast and East Asia. 

My book, entitled Empires of Vice (Princeton University Press, Histories of Economic Life Series) is a comparative and historical study of opium prohibition across Southeast Asia, which sheds light on the colonial legacies shaping the region’s drug-related problems today. It won the 2021 Giovanni Sartori Book Award and honorable mentions for the Charles Taylor Book Award from the American Political Science Association and the Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award from the Social Science History Association. 

I am a US-Korea NextGen Scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a Silvers Grant recipient with the New York Review of Books. For AY 2021-2022, I was the Hans Kohn Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. 

Before joining Georgetown University, I was a postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and B.A. from Korea University. 

Please see my CV here. Tweets @ DianaSueKim