I’m a cultural/political/feminist geo­g­ra­pher with inter­ests in reli­gion, mobil­i­ties, and dif­fer­ence. I’m cur­rently a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Geography Department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. I received my PhD in geog­ra­phy in 2009 at UC Berkeley, which is also where I stud­ied English lit­er­a­ture and women’s stud­ies as an under­grad­u­ate back in the early 90s. Starting in July 2012, I will be an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in social/cultural geog­ra­phy at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

My teach­ing and research inter­ests lie at the nexus of polit­i­cal econ­omy and cul­tural pol­i­tics in Korea and the Korean dias­pora through the inter­dis­ci­pli­nary frame­works of cul­tural geog­ra­phy, post­colo­nial cul­tural stud­ies, and crit­i­cal race, sex­u­al­ity and gen­der stud­ies. My pri­mary dis­ci­pli­nary homes are geog­ra­phy, fem­i­nist stud­ies, and crit­i­cal Korean stud­ies, and I col­lab­o­rate quite a bit with cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gists and crit­i­cal sociologists.

My PhD work involved a multi-sited and multi-scalar crit­i­cal ethnog­ra­phy of South Korean and Korean American evan­gel­i­cal Christian mis­sion­ar­ies engaged in what I call “purpose-driven travel,” i.e. reli­gious, human­i­tar­ian, and devel­op­ment projects through­out the world. This research has taken me to field work in China, Uganda, and Tanzania in addi­tion to South Korea and the U.S., and I plan to con­duct addi­tional research in Central Asia and Southeast Asia as well in the com­ing years. I’m trained as a qual­i­ta­tive researcher (ethnog­ra­phy, inter­views) but I read widely in the arts and human­i­ties and share a great deal of inter­ests with col­leagues in lit­er­a­ture, archi­tec­ture, his­tory, and reli­gious stud­ies. These days, I’m also learn­ing to employ sur­vey meth­ods and geospa­tial data analy­sis (GIS map­ping) in some of my projects, tak­ing advan­tage of my geeky ten­den­cies and tech/design skills from pre-graduate school con­sult­ing days.

I’ve worked for many years as a social jus­tice activist in racial jus­tice, immi­grant rights, and queer groups, and as an infor­ma­tion designer in the non­profit sec­tor. I aspire to pub­lish a comic book some day. Having been either too young, a res­i­dent alien, or a mere per­ma­nent res­i­dent, I have never been able to vote where I lived.

You can reach me at judy.han AT geog​.ubc​.ca or through the con­tact form. Thanks for visiting!