Sonia Ryang combines her intellectual training in British social anthropology with American cultural anthropology to study vulnerable populations, politics and ideology, diaspora, identity, love, and forms of life across Asian cultures. Her current research includes an investigation of South Korea’s rapid transformation from totalitarian regime to neoliberal society and its connection to the rise of digital technology. She is also working on culinary politics and culture in South Korea in the age of globalization.

She is the author of four books in English and one in Japanese, editor of two volumes and co-editor of one. These titles include: North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity; North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding; and Writing Selves in Diaspora: Ethnography of Autobiographics of Korean Women in Japan and the United States. Ryang’s new book, tentatively entitled Explorations in the Political: An Ethnological Reading of North Korea, will be published by Harvard University Press. She has published more than 30 articles in nationally and internationally acclaimed journals.

Ryang received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1995. She was an associate professor of anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland before joining the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Department of Anthropology in 2006. Ryang has also served as the director of the UI Center for Asian and Pacific Studies since August 2008.