Chunghee Sarah Soh
Professor
Ph.D., University of Hawaii, 1987
Office: SCI 379, Office Hours: TTH 2-250 & by appt.
Phone: (415) 338-2655, Email: soh@sfsu.edu
Sociocultural Anthropology, gender, sexuality, social stratification, social/cultural change, women in politics, human rights, and life history;
East Asia with a comparative focus on Korea and Japan;
from historical and social psychological perspectives.
My research and teaching areas encompass diverse topics in the Anthropology of Women, Gender, Human Rights, and Sexuality. At SFSU I have taught the following courses:
ANTH 120 - - Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
ANTH 315 - - Peoples and Cultures of East Asia
ANTH 415 - - Culture and Sex in East Asia
ANTH 550 - - Culture and Personality
ANTH 515 - - The Two Koreas
ANTH 551 - - Anthropology of the Body
ANTH 569 - - Cross-Cultural Aspects of Sex and Gender
ANTH 590 - - Anthropology of Women
ANTH 651 - - Ethnographic Field Methods
ANTH 680 - - Seminar in Contemporary Anthropology
ANTH 770 - - Seminar in Problems in Cultural Anthropology
Background
Prior to joining SFSU in 1994, I taught cultural anthropology at universities in Texas (1991-94), Arizona (1990-01), and Hawaii (1990) after earning my Ph.D. from the Anthropology Department of the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1987), funded by graduate scholarships from the East-West Center in Honolulu. During my dissertation field research I also taught at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea, which is my birth country. Before coming to Hawaii for my graduate training, I had lived abroad several years, studying in Japan, the Great Britain, the Philippines, Jordan, and California. These lived experiences overseas offered me invaluable opportunities to participant-observe and develop a deep interest in the diversity of cultural traditions as well as commonality in human behavioral patterns among different peoples of the world.
Projects
The Comfort Women
I have engaged in multi-sited, long-term research and publication project on Japan’s wartime comfort women phenomenon since mid-1990s. I have presented many conference papers, gave invited lectures at home and abroad, and published several journal articles and book chapters on the topic. My focus has been on diverse aspects of the international controversy surrounding the truthful nature of the military comfort system as history and Japan’s contemporary responsibility for comfort women survivors. My book, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Soh 2008, University of Chicago Press) offers an anthropological analysis of the comfort women tragedy as a prominent instance of gendered structural violence rooted in masculinist sexual culture in the historical context of colonialism, classism, sexism, imperialism, and militarism.
Women in Korean Politics
My books, The Chosen Women in Korean Politics, (1st Edition) and Women in Korean Politics (2nd Edition) analyze the life histories of women legislators in the South Korean National Assembly. They illuminate many aspects of modern Korean society, as well as the dynamics of changing male-female relations and gender-role conceptions in a modernizing society. Further descriptions and reviews of the books are available at http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~soh/abstract.htm. With a purpose to update the books, I conducted ethnographic field research in Korea during the Spring 2008 semester, supported by a grand of the Fulbright Scholar Program. I will be engaged in the analysis of the collected data and writing for quite some time.
Publications
My publications include three authored books (Soh 1991; Soh 1993; Soh 2008); dozens of journal articles and book chapters; reviews; encyclopedia pieces; commentaries in newsletters and popular media. For a complete list including translated, non-English publications in German, Japanese, and Korean, please see my home page, http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~soh
Soh 2008 The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory
in Korea and Japan. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Soh 1993 Women in Korean Politics. 2nd ed. Boulder & Oxford: Westview
Press. Reviewed in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies; Pacific Affairs; Women's Studies International Forum.
Soh 1991 The Chosen Women in Korean Politics: An Anthropological Study.
New York: Praeger.
Reviewed in American Anthropologist; Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars; The Journal of Asian Studies; Korea Journal; Korean Studies; Women & Politics.
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