Jisoo M. Kim

Jisoo M. Kim is the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at the George Washington University. She is a historian of Korea and East Asia with interests in law, justice, gender and sexuality, emotions, affect, and forensic medicine. She is the author of an award-winning book, The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), which has been translated into Korean and Chinese. She is the coeditor of JaHyun Kim Haboush’s posthumous book The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation (Columbia University Press, 2016).

At Radcliffe, Kim is writing a book tentatively titled “Criminalizing Intimacy: Marriage, Concubinage, and Adultery Law in Korea, 1469–2015.” The book traces the long history of criminalizing adultery in (South) Korea from the late 15th century until its very belated decriminalization in 2015. Using the concept of affective legality, it interrogates the criminalization of heterosexual intimacies and unequal power structures in marriage. It shows how the marriage paradigm shifted with the rise of modernity and how the global decriminalization of adultery was late to arrive in (South) Korea. This interdisciplinary research contributes to our understanding of continuously evolving marriage practices and the criminalization of sex.

She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Korean Studies and serves on several editorial boards. She received her BA from Yonsei University and her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University.