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 economies and 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 first book 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 currently writing a new book, entitled Untouchability as Global, which explores the historical origins of global varieties of caste-based discrimination (also known as untouchability). 

I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and B.A. from Korea University, and was a postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. I am a US-Korea NextGen Scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (2020-2021), Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2021-2022) and Silvers Grant recipient (2020) with the Silvers Foundation/New York Review of Books. 

Please see my CV here.