June Hee Kwon is a cultural anthropologist in the Asian Studies Program at California State University Sacramento. In her research and teaching, she focuses on migration and displacement, borderlands and political ecology, materiality and affect, gendered labor and class formation, and human suffering and memories. Her area of expertise spans contemporary Korea (North and South), China, and Japan and includes postcolonial and post-Cold War culture and political economy across East Asia. Dr. Kwon received her Ph.D. from the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Prior to joining California State University Sacramento, she was an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh.
Her first book, Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers, is a borderland ethnography on the re/interpretation of the “Korean dream” that has dominated the ethnic borderland of Yanbian, the Korean Chinese Autonomous Prefecture, since the early 1990s.