Assistant Professor Jean J. Kim
Postdoctoral Fellow
Jean Kim received her PhD in History from Cornell University and is an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. She has been a fellow at the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, and her research has appeared in the American Quarterly, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Alternative Contact (Duke University Press, 2011), and will appear in a forthcoming anthology, Diasporic Counterpoint.
While at the USSC she will expand and reframe a book manuscript on the history of medicine in Hawai'i, with an emphasis on sugar plantations, and revise two journal articles. Each of these projects broadly argue that international research networks in U.S. colonies were important to U.S. continental science and public health, and that these connections constitute important and under-appreciated ties that change the way we understand the history of the U.S. in the context of the world. These networks force a reconsideration of American internationalism, and they also underscore the productivity and importance of Oceania and of U.S. Pacific empire within American medical and scientific history.
Contextualizing the history of the U.S. within a global frame is important historiographically because it challenges U.S. exceptionalism and the relative absence of empire in U.S. historiography, and it also bridges the historical and sociological literature on Hawai'i, which is currently bifurcated between studies of colonialism, indigeneity, and sovereignty on one hand, and questions of labor organizing, immigration, and citizenship on the other. The simultaneous subjection of indigenous and immigrant laboring groups to public health programs that were shaped as much from U.S. and European colonial endeavors in East and Southeast Asia as locally in Hawai'i under white settler colonialism brings the histories of these groups into closer contact by implicating different degrees of U.S. imperial power in the structure of their lives. This research is also significant because it begins to establish a critical framework for understanding the transnational and Pacific contexts of U.S. history.
