Education

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

David Kyuman Kim
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Associated Faculty in American Studies

• 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 joined the faculty of Connecticut College in 2003. He has also taught at Harvard University and Brown University, most recently in 2009 as inaugural Visiting Professor in the Humanities at the Cogut Center for the Humanities.

He has written on freedom and agency in modernity and post-modernity, Asian-American diasporas and the Asian-American religious experience. Oxford University Press published his first book, Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics, in 2007. The Philosophy of Religion section of the American Academy of Religion hosted a highlighted panel on Melancholic Freedom during the 2008 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. The panel featured comments by Judith Butler, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, with a response by Kim. Kim has discussed the book during an appearance on The Tavis Smiley Show.

His current book project, Future Perfect, Past Conditional: Tradition, Memory, Religion, focuses on 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, such as American exceptionalism and the work of exilic writers like Edward Said, Theresa Cha, Carlos Bulosan, and James Baldwin.

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 has been in creative collaboration with his Connecticut College colleague and world-renowned choreographer David Dorfman. He served as a creative consultant for David Dorfman Dance’s "disavowal," a piece inspired by the life and legacy of the abolitionist John Brown. Kim and Dorfman are currently working together on a new piece, "Prophets of Funk/Dance to the Music," an exploration of the social engagement and expression of the prophetic, funk, and the music of Sly and the Family Stone.

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. 

In the spring of 2009, Kim served as the Acting Program Director of the Programs in Religion and the Public Sphere at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). He continues his work with the SSRC as Senior Advisor and also the Editor-at-Large of the SSRC’s blog on secularism, religion, and public life, The Immanent Frame.

An interview with Kim, “Agency as a Vocation,” was featured on the homepage of the SSRC’s Web site in March 2009. In May 2009, Kim helped to launch the discussion series “These things are old” on Obama, civic virtue, and debates about American common good on The Immanent Frame. With an introduction written by Kim, the series features essays by William Ayers, Lawrie Balfour, Romand Coles, Gary Dorrien, Todd Gitlin, Jennifer Herdt, Martin Marty, David Morgan, Ann Pelligrini and Janet Jakobsen, Jon Shields, George Shulman, and Hent de Vries, among others.

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.

Since 1989, Kim has sung with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Visit the religious studies department site.