Title:	Assistant Professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies and Religion
Office Location:	118 Gray Building
Office Phone:	(919) 660-3500
Office Fax:
Email Address:	hwansoo.kim@duke.edu
Web Page:
HWANSOO ILMEE KIM (2009) received his Ph.D. in the colonial history of Korean and Japanese Buddhism from Harvard University in 2007. He has a BA in the history of East Asian Buddhism and Yogacara philosophy from Dongguk University in Seoul, Korea (1996) and received his master’s in Buddhism and the sociology and theory of religion at Harvard Divinity School (2002). Before joining Duke, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Reischauer Institute (2007) and assistant professor at the University of Arizona (2008). Professor Kim’s primary research concerns Korean Buddhism in the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in the context of colonialism, imperialism, and modernity. His broader scholarship includes East Asian religions, the modernization of Buddhism, clerical marriage, rituals, and ethics. Recent articles, among others, are The Adventures of a Japanese Monk in Colonial Korea: Sōma Shōei’s Zen Training with Korean Masters (2008) and “The Future of Korean Buddhism Lies in My Hands”: Takeda Hanshi as a Sōtō Missionary (forthcoming). He is currently working on a book about the dynamic relationship between Korean and Japanese Buddhism from 1877–1912. The book brings to light that Korean monks, aware of the political, economic, and social stature of Japanese Buddhist missionaries, strategically allied themselves with Japanese sects to further their personal and institutional aims. This revision also highlight how Christianity, as a significant other, informed Korean and Japanese Buddhists’ approach to institutional structures, foreign missionary efforts, and modernity.

Education

• PhD, Harvard University, 2009