Position Title
Assistant Professor
Position Title
Assistant Professor
- Asian American Studies
Bio
Ga Young Chung is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies, and is affiliated with the Cultural Studies, East Asian Studies, Human Rights Studies, and the School of Education. In her research, Chung explores the mobility and precarity of more-than-humans and humans, particularly with respect to capitalism, colonialism, and uneven globalization.
She is working on a book project, The Traveling Seeds: Agrocolonialism and Decolonial Imaginations, in which she chronicles the displacement of Korean soybeans from the Korean Peninsula to North America, South America, and Southeast Asia from 1929 to 2019. Through archival research and memory work, she investigates how Korean soybeans, which were brought to the US by the “Dorsett-Morse Oriental Agricultural Exploration Expedition” in 1929, became one of the progenitors of the “American soybean” and were intertwined with the wars, lands, food system, and pharmaceutical industry in North and South America, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.
Chung co-founded the interdisciplinary, community-engaged Asian American Seed Stewards in collaboration with Asian American farmers, plant scientists, and students. In the community, she has been offering weeks-long Asian American Studies courses in collaboration with local grassroots Asian American organizations, taught in both English and Korean.
Chung serves as Chair of the Board at NAKASEC (National Korean American Service and Education Consortium) and as a board member of the Friends of Education Justice Project. Chung received her Ph.D. in Global Studies in Education, with a graduate minor in Asian American Studies, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned her M.A. and B.A. in Sociology from Yonsei University in South Korea.