Youjoung (Yuna) Kim is an interdisciplinary anthropologist and historian whose research examines the intersections of law, kinship, and histories of state violence across colonial and contemporary East Asia. Her dissertation, “State-Sanctioned Families: Law and the Recognition of Bereaved Kin under South Korea’s Jeju 4·3 Special Act,” offers a historical and ethnographic study of how transitional justice projects inscribe kinship into bureaucratic form. Focusing on the violence of Jeju 4.3 (Sasam, 1947-1954), in which over 30,000 people were killed under accusations of communist sympathies, her dissertation traces how reparations hinge upon genealogical recognition among Jeju Islanders and the Jeju diaspora in Osaka, illuminating how displacement and mass death fractured kin networks and reshaped the terms of belonging. Her research has been supported by National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Society for Psychological Anthropology as well as Johns Hopkins programs including the East Asian Studies Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Women, Gender, Sexuality, and the Center for Global Women’s Health and Gender Equity. She is a finalist for the Student Paper Prize from the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

In addition to her dissertation, Youjoung (Yuna) Kim is developing two projects on the histories of Jeju: one examining Japan’s colonial engagement with the island, and another exploring the ways the US military government in Korea sustained militarized sovereignties in the aftermath of World War II. She is also writing a short essay that presents an alternative guide to Jeju, foregrounding the island's myths and histories through Seongsan Ilchulbong, a well-known tourist site on Jeju's eastern coast.