I am an Associate 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 today's states and economies define people at their edges, and the ways that we come to take for granted what it means to be illicit, deviant or marginal. I have area expertise in Southeast and East Asia, with particular interest in their transnational connections and comparative legacies of colonial rule since the late nineteenth century. At Georgetown, I teach topics on transnational politics, colonialism and empire, modern Southeast Asian history, and illicit economies. ​

 

I am the author of Empires of Vice (Princeton University Press, 2020). Currently, I am writing a new book that explores the 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 was formerly a US-Korea NextGen Scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Member at the Institute for Advanced Study. My scholarship has received awards and generous support from the American Political Science Association, Social Science History Association, Association for Asian Studies, Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the Silvers Foundation/New York Review of Books.