Research Interest

(Im)mobilities Religion, difference, conservatism LGBTQ/queer politics and activism Comics and graphic novels Korean studies Cultural geography

Biography

Ju Hui Judy Han is a cultural geographer and Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her comics and writings about (im)mobilities, religion, and queer politics have been published in numerous scholarly journals including the Journal of Asian Studies, Critical Asian Studies, and Journal of Korean Studies as well as in several edited books including Religion, Protest, Social Upheaval (2022), Rights Claiming in South Korea (2021), Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), and Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South (2015). Han’s first book conceptualizes “queer throughlines” as connective threads of community formation and activism across time and space, and her second book—co-authored with Jennifer Jihye Chun—examines how the dramatic and ritualized radical protest repertoires by South Korean workers perform a politics of refusal and solidarity against abandonment.

Publications

• Han, J.J. 2023. Placing Infrastructure. Korean Anthropology Review 7: 65-69.
• Han, J.J. 2022. Out of Place in Time: Queer Discontents and Sigisangjo. Journal of Asian Studies 81 (1): 119-129.
• Han, J.J. 2022. LGBTQ+ Politics and The Queer Thresholds of Heresy. In Religion, Protest, Social Upheaval, eds. M.T. Eggemeier, P.J. Fritz, and K.V. Guth. New York: Fordham University Press.
• Han, J.J. 2021. The Politics of Postponement and Sexual Minority Rights in South Korea. In Rights Claiming in South Korea, eds. C. L. Arrington and P. Goedde, 236-252. London: Cambridge University Press.
• Han, J.J. 2020. The Queer Thresholds of Heresy. The Journal of Korean Studies 25 (2): 407-428.
• Han, J.J. 2020. High-Altitude Protests and Necropolitical Digits. In Digital Lives in the Global City: Contesting Infrastructures, eds. D. Cowen, A. Mitchell, E. Paradis, and B. Story, 175-178. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
• Han, J.J. 2019. Singing from the Margins. The Immanent Frame: Secularism, religion, and the public sphere. January 24, 2019.
• Han, J.J. 2018. Shifting Geographies of Proximity: Korean-led Evangelical Christian Missions and the U.S. Empire. In Ethnographies of U.S. Empire, eds. C. McGranahan and J. Collins, 194-213. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Han, J.J. 2017. Becoming Visible, Becoming Political: Faith and Queer Activism in South Korea. The Scholar & Feminist Online 14 (2).
• Han, J.J. 2016. The Politics of Homophobia in South Korea. East Asia Forum Quarterly 8 (2): 6-7.
• Chun, Jennifer J. and Han, J.J. 2015. Language Travels and Global Aspirations of Korean Youth. positions: asia critique 23 (3): 565-593.
• Han, J.J. 2015. Urban megachurches and contentious religious politics in Seoul. In Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Peter van der Veer, 133-151. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Han, J.J. 2015. K’uiŏ Chŏngch’iwa K’uiŏ Chijŏnghak. [Queer Politics and Queer Geopolitics], Munhwa/Kwahak 83: 62-81. In Korean.
• Han, J.J. 2015. Our Past, Your Future: Korean Missionaries and the Script of Prosperity. In Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South, eds. A. Roy and E.S. Crane, 178-194. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
• Han, J.J. and Chun, Jennifer J. 2014. Introduction to Gender and Politics in Contemporary Korea. Journal of Korean Studies 19 (2): 245-255.
• Na, Tari Young-Jung, translated by Ju Hui Judy Han and Se-Woong Koo. 2014. The South Korean Gender System: LGBTI in the Contexts of Family, Legal Identity, and Military. Journal of Korean Studies 19 (2): 357-377.
• Han, J.J. 2013. Beyond Safe Haven: a Critique of Christian Custody of North Korean Migrants in China. Critical Asian Studies 45 (4): 533-560.
• Han, J.J. 2011. “If You Don’t Work, You Don’t Eat”: Evangelizing Development in Africa. In New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberal Capital and Transnational Movements, ed. J. Song, 142-158. London: Routledge.
• Han, J.J. 2010. Reaching the Unreached in the 10/40 Window: The Missionary Geoscience of Race, Difference and Distance. In Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions, eds. J. Dittmer and T. Sturm, 183-207. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing.
• Han, J.J. 2010. Neither Friends nor Foes: Thoughts on Ethnographic Distance. Geoforum 41 (1): 11-14.
• Han, J.J. 2008. Missionary. Aether: the Journal of Media Geography 3: 58-83.

Education

• Ph.D., Geography, UC Berkeley
• B.A., English and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley

Awards

• UCLA Center for the Study of Women/Barbra Streisand Center, inaugural Barbra Streisand Fellowship on Truth in the Public Sphere.
• Podcast Support Grant, University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). 2021-22.
• Society of Hellman Fellows Award, UCLA. 2021-22.
• UCLA Faculty Career Development Award. 2018-2019.
• Co-Applicant, “Protesting Publics in South Korea,” Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant. PI: Jennifer Jihye Chun. 2015-2020.
• Co-Investigator, “Urban Aspirations in Seoul: Religion and Megacities in Comparative Studies,” Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and the Academy of Korean Studies. 2011-2017.

In the Media

• The New Political Cry in South Korea? The History of Feminist Activisms in South Korea. The Nordic Asia Podcast, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen.
• On South Korean feminism, Asia Experts Forum, the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, Claremont McKenna College.
• Quoted in “Why South Korean women are reclaiming their short hair,” BBC News. August 10, 2021.
• Interview, Zócalo Public Square. August 20, 2020.
• Profile, LAist. June 22, 2020.
• Interviewed in “As South Korean women protest ‘spycam porn,’ we look at what is driving the phenomenon,” KPCC/NPR AirTalk, July 9, 2018.