Sharon Yoon
Associate Professor of Korean Studies
- Office
- 2141 Jenkins And Nanovic Halls
Notre Dame, IN 46556 - Phone
- (574) 631-1670
- syoon5@nd.edu
Expertise
Race and ethnicity; migration and diaspora; social movements; nationalism and the far right; gender and masculinities; qualitative and ethnographic methods; East Asia
Biography & Research
Sharon J. Yoon is associate professor of Korean studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a core-affiliated faculty member of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.
She is president of the Association of Korean Sociologists in America (AKSA) from 2026 to 2027, and also organizes the Korean Studies Working Group at the Liu Institute.
Yoon is the author of "The Cost of Belonging: An Ethnography of Solidarity and Mobility in Beijing’s Koreatown" (Oxford University Press, 2021), which examines how transnational migration and global capitalism transformed community, solidarity, and mobility among Korean migrants in China.
Her second book, "Moving Bodies: Solidarity and Survival in Osaka’s Koreatown," is under advance contract with Columbia University Press. Based on more than a decade of participant observation, the book examines how Korean minorities and their Japanese allies built solidarity against anti-Korean hate. It argues that embodied encounters in spaces marked by marginalization and trauma can generate relationships of care and transform people who do not initially see themselves as activists into politically engaged actors.
A second strand of Yoon’s research examines migration governance and racial inequality across East Asia. She is coauthoring East Asian Migrations, a Cambridge Elements volume, with Erin Aeran Chung and Yunchen Tian. The volume examines how institutions such as household registration systems have historically structured migration governance and national membership across the region. Together with Rita Udor, Yoon also studies African migration in South Korea, focusing on racialized labor markets, masculinity, migrant family life and informal religious governance.
Yoon’s research has appeared in Politics & Society, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Migration Studies, and Gender, Work & Organization. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Korea Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Blakemore Freeman Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University and her B.A. from Dartmouth College. Before joining Notre Dame, she taught at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. She speaks Korean and Japanese and is proficient in Mandarin.
Recent Work
- "Layered Narrative Agency and the Politics of Masculine Respectability: Ghanaian Migrant Marriages in South Korea" (Men and Masculinities)
- "The rise and fall of Japan’s new far right: how anti-Korean discourses went mainstream" (Politics & Society)
Courses
- Race in Asia (undergraduate course in Asian studies, elective for master of global affairs)
- Connecting Asia (undergraduate elective)