Research Expertise and Interest

Japan, Korea, women's studies, gender studies, medicine, religion, colonialism, Asian diaspora

Research Description

H. Yumi Kim is an Associate Professor of East Asia. She is a historian of Japan and Korea, with research and teaching interests in cultural and social histories of women, gender, medicine, religion, and colonialism in Japan, Korea, and the Asian diaspora in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Her first book, Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2022), examines the creation of a gendered and family-based approach to managing madness in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that the caregiving obligations of families, and especially the women therein, intensified even as the Japanese state established European-inspired medical institutions such as psychiatry. The book was awarded the 2023 John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in East Asian history after 1800.

She is working on her second book, which explores the persecution of female shamans in the outermost edges of the Japanese empire: the annexed islands of Okinawa, the remote areas of Northeast Japan (Tōhoku), and the colonized territory of Cheju Island in what is now South Korea. She is thinking about ways to center the experiences of the persecuted women, especially their ways of knowing and relating with earthly and divine realms that sustained their communities in precarious times of colonialism and war.

Before coming to Berkeley, she was Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University.