Sujin Eom
|Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages
I am a scholar of architecture and urbanism whose research is anchored in a historical inquiry into race, migration, and the built environment. My research interests include colonial architecture and urbanism, empire studies, migration and diaspora, race and racism, Asian/American architecture, infrastructures, and archives. My first book, Traveling Chinatowns: The Architecture of Migration and Violence in Colonial Korea (Stanford University Press, 2027), situates "Chinatown" as an imaginative and material space within the global history of empire, labor migration, and violence while foregrounding colonial Korea in the discussion of global Chinese migration and transpacific racialization. I am currently working on my second monograph on Asian American architects at midcentury. Tentatively titled Contested Domesticity: Asian American Midcentury Modern, this new project examines midcentury modernism as a contested site for American domesticity, calling into question the contradictory ways in which "Asians" were incorporated into the inside of the American home at midcentury—a crucial moment of history when the boundaries of the United States were drastically transformed along with its military expansion into Asia and the Pacific.
Contact
Anonymous, Room 309
HB 6191
Department(s)
Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages
Education
- Ph.D in Architecture, University of California, Berkeley
- M.S. in Architecture, Seoul National University
- B. Arch (Bachelor of Architecture), Seoul National University
Selected Publications
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Eom, Sujin. 2025. "The Death of Migrants: Lessons from the Anti-Chinese Riots of 1931 in Korea." PLATFORM, September 8.
Eom, Sujin (with Sean H. McPherson). 2024. "Conservation of Korean American Architecture and Architectural Archives." Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation and the Built Environment, Vol. 13, No. 1, 94-116.
Eom, Sujin. 2024. "Fugitive Archives: Architecture, Police Photography, and Decolonial Futures." Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 56, No. 4, 576-601. (Winner of the 2025 Korean Literature Association Article Prize)
Eom, Sujin. 2023. "Bulldozing the Dead: Chinese, Citizenry, and Cemetery in Postcolonial South Korea." Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 57, No. 1, 53-69.
Eom, Sujin. 2020. "Infrastructures of Displacement: The Transpacific Travel of Urban Renewal during the Cold War." Planning Perspectives, Vol. 35, No. 2, 299-319.
Eom, Sujin (with Nezar AlSayyad). 2020. "On the Possibility of Urban Citizenship: Inclusive Identities, Exclusive Places." Being Urban: Community, Conflict and Belonging in the Middle East, edited by Simon Goldhill. London: Routledge.
Eom, Sujin. 2019. "After Ports Were Linked: Paradoxes of Transpacific Connectivity in the Nineteenth Century." Imaginaries of Connectivity and Creation of Novel Spaces of Governance, edited by Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Suvi Alt, and Maarten Meijer. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 67-87.
Eom, Sujin. 2019. "The Idea of Chinatown: Rethinking Cities from the Periphery." On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis, edited by Jesook Song and Laam Hae. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 21-42.
Eom, Sujin (with Nezar AlSayyad). 2018. "Bottom-Down Urbanism." The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom- Up Urbanism, edited by Mahyar Arefi and Conrad Kickert. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 271-285.
Eom, Sujin. 2017. "Traveling Chinatowns: Mobility of Urban Forms and Asia in Circulation." positions: asia critique, Vol. 25, No. 4, 693-716.
Eom, Sujin. 2013. "The Specter of Modernity: Open Ports and the Making of Chinatowns in Japan and South Korea." Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Vol. 24, No. 2, 39-50.
Book Reviews
Eom, Sujin. 2025. Review of Jiat-Hwee Chang and Justin Zhuang, "Everyday Modernism: Architecture & Society in Singapore" (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2023), caa.reviews.
Eom, Sujin. 2024. Review of Se-Mi Oh, "City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), Korea Journal, Vol. 64, No. 3, 268-273.
Eom, Sujin. 2013. Review of Jini Kim Watson, "The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form" (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Vol. 25, No. 1, 83-84.
Commissioned Project Reports
Eom, Sujin (with Sean H. McPherson). 2023. "Korean American Architects and Designers." SAH-Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Initiative: Rediscovering Asian American and Pacific Islander Architects & Designers, edited by Gail Dubrow, Sean H. McPherson, and Yao-Fen You. A project report on AAPI architecture submitted to Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, 104-126.
Works In Progress
Traveling Chinatowns: The Architecture of Migration and Violence in Colonial Korea (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2027)