David Kyuman Kim, the Director for the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity and an assistant professor of religious studies, specializes in philosophy of religion, religious theory, political theory, Asian American religious studies, and race and ethnic studies. His book Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2007, and his current book project, Excessive Modernity examines conceptions of the secular in light of the relationships between religion, race, and memory.