Biography
Jaewoo Kim is a PhD student at Columbia University studying East Asian religions. His research focuses on religious encounters, especially the conflicts and negotiations that arise when traditions and communities meet under asymmetrical power. He explores how otherness is transacted in these encounters rather than given in advance. His work thus asks what forms religious subjectivity took in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Korea and Japan, where religious identity was registered and performed as much as professed. In particular, he examines how labels of heterodoxy were deployed and contested. He also attends closely to space and material culture, tracing how administrative technologies reorganized the sites of religious life and how practitioners made their lives within these structures.