NANCY ABELMANN
Associate Professor
I am an anthropologist committed to ethnographic methods and cultural theory, I delight in the careful mentoring of theoretically and historically informed ethnographers.
Completed Projects
Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement (UC Press, 1996) was inspired by an interest in the politics of history and memory. My experience teaching many Korean Americans culminated in Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Harvard U. Press, 1995) (with John Lie). My growing interests in class in South Korea culminated in: The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Class, and Talk in Contemporary South Korea (U. of Hawai’i Press, 2003) in which I examine the familial production of class and of personal fates over an era of dizzying social transformation; and Gender, Genre, and National Cinema: South Korean Golden Age Melodrama (Wayne State University Press, forthcoming).
Current Work
My interests in South Korean families, class, and education have taken another life in: Been There, Doing This: Korean American Families go to College, a longitudinal ethnographic study of a cohort of Korean American college students in public higher education in Illinois; and in a co-edited volume, South Korea’s Educational Transformation: The Ethnography of Schooling at the Margins. A visiting year in the Department of Clinical and Community Psychology has led to a collaborative project, Korean American Immigrant and Second-generation Mental Health in the Familial Context.
Pedagogy
Currently I serve as the advisor for 10 Ph.D. candidates; we meet weekly as a group and I am a strong believer in a community of cooperative graduate students who grow through sustained interest in each other's work.
At the heart of my pedagogical life in the last few years is a project that I founded in 2001 and currently co-organize, The Ethnography of the University (EOTU, www.eotu.uiuc.edu) – an initiative that sponsors undergraduate research on the university and archives it in web-accessible form.Research Interests:
Sociocultural anthropology
South Korea, Japan, Asian America
substantive and theoretical interests: social movements, class/social mobility, education, immigration, families,
and gender, culture, history, memory, transnationalism, and social transformation.
EDUCATION:
A.B. East Asian Studies, concentration on Japan (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), Harvard University, 1982
M.A. Social Cultural Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1984
Ph.D. Social Cultural Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1990
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Books:
| 2003 | The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Class, and Talk in Contemporary South Korea. Hawaii University Press. |  |
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1996 | Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. |
| 1995 | Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (with John Lie). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. |  |
Essays & Articles:
| 2004 | “‘Just Because’: Comedy, Melodrama, and Youth Violence in Attack at the Gas Station (with Jung-ah Choi). In Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer, eds. New Korean Cinema. Edinburgh University Press. |
| 2004 | “A Failed Attempt at Transnational Marriage: Maternal Citizenship in a Globalizing South Korea” (with Hyunhee Kim). In Nicole Constable, ed. Cross Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia. University of Pennsylvania Press. |
| 2001 | “Women, Mobility, and Desire: Narrating Class and Gender in South Korea” in Laurel Kendall, ed. Gender and Social Change in Late Twentieth Century Korea. University of Hawaii Press. 25-54. |
| 1997 | “Women’s Class Mobility and Identities in South Korea: A Gendered, Transnational, Narrative Approach.” The Journal of Asian Studies 56.2 (May): 398-420. |
| 1997 | “Narrating Selfhood and Personality in South Korea: Women and Social Mobility.” American Ethnologist 24.4 (November): 786-812. |
COURSES TAUGHT:
| ANTH 286 | ANTHROPOLOGICAL ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF ASIAN AMERICA |
| EALC 185 | SOUTH KOREAN SOCIETY THROUGH (FEATURE) FILM |
| ANTH 366 | THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CLASS AND CULTURE |
| EALC 298A | THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF CONTEMPORARY EAST ASIA |
| EALC 450B | THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF KOREA |
| ANTH 199AK | THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE UNIVERSITY |
| EALC 400 | THEORY AND METHOD IN THE STUDY OF EAST ASIA |