Sungyun Lim

Affiliated Faculty are not employees of the Center for Asian Studies. Please contact this faculty member at their home department.

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

B.A. and M.A., Seoul National University (Korea)

Regional and Thematic Interests

Women, family, and legal history of modern East Asia

Profile

Professor Lim offers courses on the history of Japan and Korea, which include: "Introduction to Korean History,” "Women in East Asian History.” "Introduction to Japanese History," and "Modern Japanese History."

Professor Lim's first book, Rules of the House: Family Law and Domestic Disputes in Colonial Korea examines the formation of small patriarchal family in Korea under the Japanese colonial rule through examination of civil case records of domestic disputes.

Professor Lim is currently working on two research projects. The first one is on the history of property rights over burial sites in modern Korea, which highlights the murky clash of traditional land rights and the modern concept of land ownership. The second project is on the history of domestic adoption in Korea, focusing on how the highly restrictive adoption regime inherited from the colonial period continued to shape adoption practices in postcolonial South Korea.

Professor Lim is the recipient of multiple Korean Foundation Fellowships and a Japan Foundation Fellowship. In 2012-2013, she was the Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Center for Korean Studies and in Spring 2020, she was the Kyujanggak fellow at the International Center for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. 

Selected Publications

Lim, S. Rules of the House: Family Law and Domestic Disputes in Colonial Korea. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.

2016. “Affection and Assimilation: Concubinage and the Ideal of Conjugal Love in Colonial Korea, 1922-1938,” Gender and History, Vol. 28, No. 2.

2013. “Women on the Loose: Colonial Household System and Family Anxiety in Korea” in Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Mobile Subjects: Boundaries and Identities in Modern Korean Diaspora, (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley)