Education

B.A. University of Rochester;
M.Div. & Th.D. Harvard University

David Kyuman Kim
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Inaugural Director, Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE)
On Sabbatical Academic Year 2008-2009

• Philosophy of religion
• Religion and critical theory
• Religion and political theory
• Modern and contemporary religious thought
• Human agency, moral philosophy, and ethics
• Religious theory
• Asian American studies

David Kyuman Kim came to Connecticut College in 2003 after completing a visiting appointment in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University. He has written on freedom and agency in modernity and post-modernity, Asian American diasporas, and the Asian American religious experience. His book Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. 

His current book project, Excessive Modernity: Race, Religion, Memory, focuses on the how the construction of memory, counter-memory, and history fortify as well as destabilize the collective identities and cultures of late-modern forms of social solidarity, particularly as expressed in the work of exilic writers like Edward Said, Theresa Cha, Carlos Bulosan, and James Baldwin, on the one hand, and the discourse of cosmopolitanism, on the other.

In July 2005, Kim was appointed the inaugural director of the Connecticut College's sixth academic center, the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE).

In April 2008, CCSRE sponsored a symposium, "Race, Space and Memory" at Connecticut College. Visit the CCSRE site for full details.

In 2004-2005, Kim organized, with Julie Rivkin (Department of English), the year-long colloquium at Connecticut College, "Theory in Transition." Speakers included Homi Bhabha (Harvard University), Craig Calhoun (New York University and the Social Science Research Council), Thomas Dumm (Amherst College), Sharon Holland (Northwestern University), and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Columbia University).  The Colloquium included faculty seminars, a public lecture series, and the upper-level seminar, co-taught with Professor Rivkin, "Critique, Power, and the Other: Theory across the Disciplines".

Collaborating in 2005-2006 with Larry Vogel (Department of Philosophy), Kim put together another year-long colloquium at the College called "Living a Moral Life", with guest appearances by Kathleen Cleaver (Yale University and Emory University), Romand Coles (Duke University), Rebeccan Hamilton (Harvard University and the Genocide Intervention Network), Joshua Rubenstein (Amnesty International), and Slavoj Zizek (University of Slovenia).

Among the events organized by Professor Kim and the CCSRE for 2005-2006 was a series of guest lectures in the CCSRE course "Theorizing Race and Ethnicity" (download the course syllabus here in PDF format) and a two-day Symposium on Cornel West's "Democracy Matters" held on April 21-22, 2006. View video streams from the Symposium.

Kim is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the American Political Science Association, the American Studies Association, the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative, and the Association for Asian American Studies.  Since 1989, Kim has sung with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

At Connecticut College, Professor Kim teaches the following courses: 
Introduction to the Study of Religion
The Christian Tradition
Theories of Religion
Religion and the Discontents of Modernity
Identity, Place, and Religion: Nostalgia and the Quest for Home
Religion and the Spirit of Politics
Critique, Power, and the Other: Theory across the Disciplines
Living a Moral Life
Theorizing Race and Ethnicity

Visit the religious studies department site.