HISTORIAN OF RELIGION, MIGRATION, AND EMPIRE IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE PACIFIC WORLD

I am a historian of religion, migration and borders, U.S. empire, and Asian America, with particular interests in Asian American and Pacific Islander history, immigration and border governance, the religious and cultural dimensions of U.S. foreign relations, and the transpacific history of the United States after the Civil War. I am a Faculty Fellow in Asian/Pacific/American Studies at New York University's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, beginning Fall 2026. I received my PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard University in 2026, with fields in North American Religions and History.

My research examines the role of religion in histories of migration, citizenship, racial governance, and American expansion across the Pacific. I am especially interested in the encounters among religious institutions, state institutions, and people on the move: how missionaries and reformers participated in debates over immigration and national belonging; how religious ideas about morality, race, sexuality, family, and civilization entered the classification and governance of migrants; and how Asian and Asian American communities contested and reshaped those categories. At NYU, I teach across Asian/Pacific/American Studies, U.S. history, migration, religion, race, and empire.

I’m currently revising my first book manuscript, Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies, a religious history of the emergence of federal immigration restriction. Moving across the United States and the Pacific world, the book traces missionaries, reform organizations, Protestant institutions, immigration officials, and Asian and Asian American religious actors to show how religious ideas and institutions helped shape the discursive and administrative foundations of Asian exclusion.

My broader research and writing span Asian migration and diaspora, religion and U.S. empire, modern transformation of citizenship-border discourses, religion and the racial science of the body, and Asian American religious history. I am completing “Migration and Diaspora” for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Asian American Religions (Oxford University Press, 2027). I am also beginning a second book project, Freedom’s Debtors: Christianity, Memory, and the Moral Economy of U.S. Empire in Asia, which examines how memories of American war, aid, liberation, and resettlement generated competing claims of gratitude, indebtedness, alliance, and political obligation across Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnamese refugee and diasporic communities.

My research has been supported by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Historical Society, Rockefeller Archive Center, Congregational Library & Archives, APARRI, the American Academy of Religion, and the Organization of American Historians, among others. My research on religion, U.S. immigration restriction, and Asian America was featured in Harvard’s GSAS Research Magazine. You can read the full feature here.

Before completing my PhD at Harvard, I received an MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a BA in Sociology and Theology and a ThM in the History of Christianity from Yonsei University in Seoul. Before graduate school, I also worked for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Asian edition of the International Herald Tribune, which later became New York Times Global Edition, in Seoul.