Ga Young Chung, Ph.D.

Ga Young Chung, Ph.D.

Ga Young Chung

Assistant Professor

  • Asian American Studies

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 im/mobility and precarity of humans and non-humans, particularly with respect to capitalism, colonialism, and uneven globalization. 

Drawing on a decade-long ethnographic study, Chung is completing her first book manuscript, entitled Unexpired: Undocumented Youth Time and Futurity (under contract with NYU Press), which explores how undocumented Korean immigrant youth engage with competing possible futures through education, military service, and activism. The work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Society of Hellman Fellowship, the National Research Foundation of Korea, and the Academy of Korean Studies, among others.
 
In her second book project, The Traveling Seeds: Agrocolonialism and Decolonial Imaginations, she chronicles the displacement of Korean soybeans from the Korean Peninsula to North America, South America, and Southeast Asia over the period spanning 1929-2019. Through archival research, memory work, and ethnography, 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, the food system, and the pharmaceutical industry.

 

Chung founded the interdisciplinary, community-engaged Asian American Seed Stewards in collaboration with Asian American farmers, plant scientists, and students in 2020. She is a co-investigator on two transnational research initiatives, Resilient Academics: Re-imagining Academic Horizons, funded by the Universitas 21, and Race and Gender: Theorizing the New Racialization of the Asian Migrants in South Korea, a multi-year research project supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea. 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 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and obtained her M.A. and B.A. in Sociology from Yonsei University in South Korea.