Research

DISSERTATION PROJECT

Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies:
American Liberal Protestants, US Immigration Policymaking,
and the Fashioning of Asians as “Undesirables,” 1882-1924

(Photo Credit: “A Statue for Our Harbor.”
George Frederick Keller for The Wasp. Nov. 11, 1881. Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

My dissertation delves into the critical, but underexplored, role of American liberal Protestants in the creation and expansion of racially restrictive and religiously selective US immigration policies between 1882 and 1924— a pivotal period when the nation’s earliest and harshest immigration restriction laws were established. By retracing the processes through which liberal Protestants helped to frame immigrants from Asia as “undesirable” and “unassimilable” immigrants, this project asks why the unprecedented arrival of Asian immigrants after the 1870s powerfully challenged, but ultimately failed to subvert, the popular narrative that the ideal American citizen should be white and Protestant.

The first part of the dissertation highlights the religious origins and motivations behind the emergence of the Immigration Restriction League in Massachusetts and the Asiatic Exclusion League in California. Here, I demonstrate how immigration restrictionists at both federal and state levels strategically employed religious discourses and resources to advocate for the screening and criminalization of Asian immigrants.

The second half of the dissertation examines how, between 1908 and 1924, liberal Protestants shaped national debates on immigration policy, influencing the Dillingham Commission and contributing to the passage of the era’s three most severe anti-Asian immigration laws (1917, 1921, 1924). Politically engaged liberal Protestants framed “the Asiatic problem” as an opportunity to reinforce the cultural and political dominance of white Protestantism, portraying Asian/Americans as threats to the physical, mental, and moral-spiritual health of the nation. Through a close analysis of sermons, public statements by clergy, religious organizing, and political lobbying, this section interrogates how and why liberal Protestants’ social reform efforts aligned with anti-immigration rhetoric, racial science, and eugenics.

By demonstrating how American liberal Protestant individuals, churches, and organizations shaped and redefined legal and popular notions of good versus bad, beneficial versus unbeneficial, and deserving versus undeserving immigrants, the dissertation shows that religion was not incidental to, but rather constitutive of, the creation and expansion of an oppressive system of immigration control and the (re)construction of anti-Asian rhetoric from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

Selected Conference PApers

  • “For the Conversion of Other Asiatic Peoples”: The Mythologized Convergence of Missionary and American Interests in the Korean Frontier to Hawaii in the Era of Asian Exclusion, 1900-1905

    2025 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Church History (ASCH), Chicago, IL (January 3-6, 2025)

    Panel: Missionary Intelligence and U.S. Ambition
    * Panelists: David Holland (Harvard, Chair), Emily Conroy-Krutz (MSU, Respondent), Ethan Goodnight (Harvard), Johanna Mueller (Stanford), and Seokweon Jeon

    SYNOPSIS: This paper investigates the complex interplay between missionary and American interests during the early 20th century, spotlighting the Korean immigration to Hawaii from 1902 to 1905. This migration, distinctively initiated and led visibly by American Methodist missionaries, highlights the critical role of missionaries as intermediaries between the US government, the Korean government, and Hawaiian planters, uncovering the nuanced and sometimes conflicting visions of ‘missionary interests’ and ‘American interests.’ Missionaries, deemed divinely sanctioned, interwove their spiritual missions with America's imperial diplomatic-economic ambitions, initiating and advocating Korean migration to Hawaiian plantations. The missionaries’ pivotal role in promoting mass migration of Koreans to Hawaiian plantations illustrates how they strategically emphasized the interests of the missionaries as the interests of the United States. Yet, their involvement in Korean migration, contrary to President Theodore Roosevelt's 1901 directive for Hawaii to develop along "traditional American lines" and their support for the Hawaiian plantation system amid legal constraints on 'contract labor', indicates how missionary activities sometimes diverged from the official American domestic and foreign policy, especially in scenarios where the interests of the state and the church were at odds. Through accounts of cooperation, rivalry, and even hostility among missionaries and between them and American officials, this paper provides a nuanced perspective on how these divergent priorities influenced America's narrative of benevolence and moral authority abroad.

  • Moral Borders and Immoral(ized) Crossings: The Transpacific Emergence of the ‘War on Asian Prostitutes’ in 19th-Century America and the ‘Yellow Peril’ as the Sexual Peril

    2024 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Diego, CA (November 23-26, 2024)

    Panel: Narratives of Embodiment and Corporeal Control: Constructing and Performing APIA Corporeality at the Intersection of the Sacred and the Secular (Panel Organizer)
    * Panelists: Jane Hong (Occidental College, Presider), K. Christine Pae (Denison University, Respondent), Karis Ryu (Yale), Flora Tang (Notre Dame), and Seokweon Jeon

    SYNOPSIS: This paper explores the transpacific formation of the 'War on Prostitution' agenda and the fear of the yellow peril, perceived as both the sexual and moral peril in 19th-Century America, examining the confluence of gendered and religious ideologies that underpin migration-control policies. In elucidating the dynamics of what Espiritu, Lowe, and Yoneyama (2017) called 'transpacific intimacies and entanglements' in the construction and dissemination of a moral panic concerning "Asian sexual slavery," the paper delves into how constructs of morality, intricately linked with state apparatuses, have been utilized to demarcate the limits of permissible conduct for women, especially targeting individuals deemed 'immoral' by state and religious entities.The paper focuses particularly on the influence of American foreign missions in East Asia and local political and religious discourses that have further categorized and controlled women based on perceived moral failings, scrutinizing the implications these measures have had on the broader discourse of migration and moral regulation.

  • How to Sanctify an Empire: American Foreign Mission in Korea and Transpacific Labor Migration to Hawaiʻi, 1890-1910

    2024 OAH (Organization of American Historians) Conference on American History, New Orleans, LA (April 11-14, 2024)

    Panel: Mapping the Encounter Between Religion and Empire in American History (Panel Organizer)
    * Panelists: Heather Curtis (Tufts, Chair), Michael McNally (Carleton College, Commentator), Anthony Trujillo (Harvard), Damanpreet Pelia (Yale), and Seokweon Jeon (Organizer)

    SYNOPSIS: In this paper, I examine American missionaries’ labor recruiting efforts in Korea and Hawaiʻi and reveal the interactions between American Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries and Hawaii’s sugar planters. The paper sees American Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries in Korea as an intermediary between Korean immigrants, the Korean government, and the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA). What is being highlighted is the critical role that American foreign missions played in the creation and expansion of the global networks of labor extraction and exchange between 1890 and the 1910s. By doing so, the study asks how religion (specifically, American foreign mission) engaged in the emergence and maintenance of what Sven Beckert (2014) calls “global networks of labor, capital, and state power” in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries. At the same time, by drawing upon primary materials relating to the experience of Koreans, the paper examines how and why the system of indentured labor and transpacific labor migration took image of salvation, benevolence, and rescue, showing religious thoughts, practices, and institutions were integral to normalizing the burgeoning US imperial designs and desires.

  • "No Freedom without Christianity”: Religion, Imperial Mobility, and Resistance among Korean Students in U.S. colleges and universities, 1910-1939

    Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA) 2023, Montreal, Canada (November 2-5, 2023)

    Panel: Collaboration, Critique, Resistance: Rethinking the Study of Religion and U.S. Empire
    * Panelists: Eleanor Craig (Harvard, Chair), Damanpreet Pelia (Yale), Emily Morrell (Princeton), Jacob Barrett (UNC Chapel Hill), and Seokweon Jeon

    SYNOPSIS: Unlike its historically harsh and tight restrictions on the low-skilled Asian population, US immigration restrictions were quite lenient to high-skilled professionals and students from Asia even at the height of the racist Asian exclusion era. As the beneficiaries of, what Paul Kramer called, “imperial openings,” a significant number of Korean students were exempt from exclusion and enjoyed a relatively greater freedom of movement in the early twentieth century. 

    This paper focuses on Korean students who attended U.S. colleges and universities between the 1910s and the 1930s and explores how they navigated the two empires— the US empire and Japanese empire— through their religious ideas and practices. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished manuscripts from various periodicals and autobiographies, diaries, and correspondence records written by those who studied in US colleges, this paper examines how those Korean students understood an Americanized, imperialist vision of Christianity as the most important tool for Korea to obtain its independence from Japan. The paper argues that Christianity offered these Korean students a crucial site where their anti-colonial resistance and solidarity could be constructed and reinforced. At the same time, their adoption of predominantly white, American, evangelical vision of ‘freedom’ and “resistance” eventually prevented them from adopting a more inclusive, progressive, and indigenous form of anti-imperialism.

  • The Imperial Turn in American Religious History: An APA Religious Critique

    2023 Annual Meeting of the Asian Pacific Religions Research Initiative, UC Berkeley, CA (June 19-22, 2023)

    SYNOPSIS    : The field of American religious history has recently seen a surge of publications (specifically, edited volumes) on the historical relationships between American religion and US imperialism, advancing critical debates on how American religion and US imperialism developed in tandem. However, one striking aspect of these recent publications is the relative and absolute lack of attention to US imperialism’s entanglements with APA religions and communities. Through an in-depth analysis of some of the recent edited volumes and survey texts on American religion(s) and US empire, this paper examines where does this problematic marginalization of APA religions/communities come from and what negative impact the erasure has brought.
    The second part of the paper draws upon recent books on US empire and American religion by APARRI members and asks: (1) how their studies on APA religions/communities and US empire challenge the way that US imperialism’s past and its continued operations have been understood? (2) in what ways they call upon different methods and archives for acquiring knowledges? In addressing them, the paper explores potential ways that APA religious critique points towards possible future trajectories and lines of analysis for the discipline of American religious history.

  • Selling and Subletting the Body of Christ: Buying, Selling, Closing, and Subletting Churches in Greater Boston

    2022 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Denver, CO (November 19-22, 2022)

    Panel: Religion, Moral Panics, and the American City (part of North American Religion Unit)
    * Panelists: Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, (Kalamazoo College, Presider & Respondent), Kolby Knight (UCSB), Lynne Gerber (Independent Scholar), and Seokweon Jeon

    SYNOPSIS: By retracing the new trend of immigrants’ purchase and rental of formerly white churches in the Greater Boston area, this paper examines how the mass arrival of Latinx and Asian immigrants to Boston since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 has dramatically changed Boston’s religious landscape. This serves as a prism to analyze the multi-layered processes through which the new immigrants were incorporated into and remade the modern American religious landscape and cityscape.

  • Centering White Evangelical Masculinity in the Gendered Racialization of Asian Women: The 2021 Atlanta Massacre and beyond

    2022 Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative, USC, CA (July 12-14, 2022)

    SYNOPSIS: Dominant popular and academic discourses on the 2021 Atlanta massacre largely failed to critically examine why the attacker, Robert Aaron Long, who was described as “a devout Christian boy,” saw Asian women as an existential threat to white Christian rectitude. This paper examines how the fetishization, hypersexualization, and immoralization of Asian women’s bodies underpinned the very foundation of modern US immigration law. It also reveals Asian women’s association with temptation, immorality, and disposability is one of the key sites where a racialized, violent ideal of modern white evangelical manhood was created and sustained through.

  • “When America is not your Destination: The Rise of Transient Migration in the US and the Transformation of Asian Migrants’ Religious Life”

    2020 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Boston, MA (November, 2020)

    SYNOPSIS: America, which once was believed to be the ‘land of no return,’ is increasingly populated by the people who view this land as a ‘temporary home.’ This shift calls upon our field to interrogate a new group of people who have not previously been the subject of scholarly research—transient migrants, who spend a significant amount of time in America and return to their country of origin. To address this increasingly significant phenomenon, this paper draws on quantitative and qualitative data collected from an ethnographic study of four Asian immigrant churches in Greater Boston between 2017- 2019.

Workshops / Seminars organized

  • Archipelago of Resettlement

    Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi - Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization Across Guam and Israel-Palestine

    I organized a book talk event with Prof. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (UCLA, Asian American Studies) on her book Archipelago of Resettlement (UC Press, 2022)

  • Navigating Pacific Islands Studies in AAPI (2022)

    Navigating Pacific Islands Studies in "AAPI" - From the Academic to the Personal (2022)

    This open forum + guided discussion, featured Dr. Rebecca Hogue, centered on the state of Pacific Islands Studies and its ongoing relationships with AAPI studies.

  • 2021-22 AAPI Studies Working Group Seminar

    I organized a series of workshops and lecture events centered around a common theme, “Re/Un-doing “Asian/American/Pacific Islander Studies”: History, Relations, and Politics of a Label.”

  • Approach Talk with Vivek Bald

    Approaches to Ethnic & Indigenous Studies: Vivek Bald (2021)

    This talk series aims to provide informal conversations with faculty from Harvard and beyond to consider the methodological contributions that ethnic and Indigenous studies make across the academic disciplines. In 2021 November, I moderated (not organized) the conversation with Prof. Vivek Bald (MIT).

  • Cure/ation and Creation: Asian American Feminist Media Making (2021)

    As part of workshop series, “Processing the Pandemic/These Times: Cure/ation and Creation,” I organized an interactive discussion and workshop on Asian American feminist media practices and narratives with the Asian American Feminist Collective.

  • Processing the Pandemic: The AAPI COVID-19 Project, Findings, Methods, Community (2020)

    This two-part workshop series showcased AAPI responses to COVID-19— as both a virus and a social construction— throughout the social sciences, with particular emphasis on methods, findings, and community engagement.

  • Between Tower and Sea: Creative Directions w/ Paul Bonnell (2021)

    As part of EMR's workshop series, “Processing the Pandemic/These Times,” this creative workshop explored themes of drifting and alighting, Floating and fragmentation with the Idaho-based hybrid artist Paul Bonnel.

  • A Conversation with Melissa Borja (2021)

    In 2021, I launched a new conversation series entitled “Conversation with AAPI Harvard Scholars,” aiming to provide Harvard scholars a chance to showcase and introduce their on-going research on the histories, literatures, cultures and contemporary realities of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities to the members of the broader Harvard community.

  • Parenting Outside of Religion: What ‘Nones’ Are Passing On to Their Children

    As a founding organizer of Nonreligion and SBNR Research Seminar (sponsored by the CSWR), I organized a public lecture event with Prof. Christel Manning. This lecture explored what religious nones believe, what are they passing on to their children, the challenges they face in a culture where religion is still equated with morality.

  • Mapping Spiritual Landscapes of Unaffiliated Millennials: Conversation with Angie Thurston

    As the third segment of the 2018-2019 Nonreligion and SBNR Research Seminar Lecture Series, I organized and moderated a talk with Angie Thurston, director of the On Being Innovation Lab. The event explored the contemporary landscape of spiritual community innovation.

  • Religious Nones in Contemporary Urban China

    As the fifth and last segment of the 2018-2019 Nonreligion and SBNR Research Seminar Lecture Series (sponsored by the CSWR), I organized a public lecture event with Prof. Anna Sun (Duke, Religious Studies). The event richly explored spiritual/religious practices of religious nones in contemporary China.