Profile: Sue Jean Cho, Ph.D. 2007

Sue Jean completed her Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University in 2007. Her dissertation is entitled “Inventing Koreans Abroad: Immigration, Cultural Citizenship, and History Making, 1903-2003,” and it traces the history of overseas Koreans and the complex set of roles they played over the course of the twentieth century. Sue Jean explores the identities and images cultivated by overseas Korean communities and ask how and why such identities and images are constructed. Using theories on cultural citizenship, she employs an interdisciplinary set of historical and ethnographic methodologies in order to examine issues of identity and national belonging within mutually interlocking analytical frames of Korean immigration history, current Korean overseas communities, and U.S.-South Korean relations. The highlights of Sue Jean’s experience as a graduate student include receiving the Joseph M. Fletcher Award for her A.M. thesis entitled “Outside the Diasporic Paradigm: A Broader Typology of Koreans in America” and being awarded the Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching for her work as Teaching Fellow for Professor Carter Eckert’s “Two Koreas” Core Course. Sue Jean is currently a Fellow and Program Coordinator at the Korea Institute, Harvard University.