Dr. Yumi Kim

Biography

H. Yumi Kim is a historian specializing in the histories of medicine, psychiatry, gender, family, colonialism, and religion in East Asia, particularly around the Pacific Empires during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research focuses on the centrality of family in providing care and shaping understandings of madness in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Japan. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Madness Family: Gender, Care, Illness Japan," which examines how families mediated the experiences of afflicted members within new state psychiatric institutions and the distinct gendered practices that emerged around care and illness. Her article, “Seeing Cages: Home Confinement in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” published in the Journal of Asian Studies, won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Article Prize in 2019. Dr. Kim's research has been supported by prestigious organizations, including the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She welcomes applications from potential graduate students interested in modern Japanese history and transnational studies in gender, medicine, psychiatry, and religion.

Research Interests