History is thrilled to welcome Yumi Kim, a brilliant scholar of modern East Asia, who comes to Cal after several years teaching in the history department at Johns Hopkins University. Kim received her B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard, her M.A. in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. At Johns Hopkins, she amassed an impressive teaching record, developing a wide variety of courses in Japanese, Korean, and gender history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her undergraduate survey “Japan and the World” was the most highly enrolled undergraduate history course at Johns Hopkins.
Kim’s publications have been recognized for their excellence. In 2019, her article in the flagship Journal of Asian Studies – “Seeing Cages: Photographs of Home Confinement in Early Twentieth Century Japan” – won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Article Prize. And her first monograph – Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2022) – won the coveted John King Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association.
Grounded in a remarkable wealth of primary sources, Madness in the Family examines the social and cultural history of mental illness and its treatment in Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to advancing a series of fascinating arguments about how families and local gender dynamics shaped the history of mental illness in modern Japan, Madness in the Family sheds light on the history of Japanese law, science, state-making, and commercial culture. While largely focused on the decades after the mid nineteenth-century Meiji Restoration, it follows the evolution of ideas about madness and mental health treatment across a long swathe of time, ranging from the Edo period to the post-WWII era. Madness in the Family is empirically dense, thematically rich, and unusually broad in its temporal coverage. As impressive, it moves seamlessly between a “top-down” focus on psychiatric, medical, and state discourses on madness, on the one hand, and the “bottom-up” perspectives of male and female mental patients and their families, on the other. When combined with its trenchant analyses, lively narrative, and clear and engaging writing style, the prodigious research on display in Madness and the Family makes it easy to understand why the reception of the book has been so effusively positive.
Kim is currently working on a second book provisionally entitled Female Shamans and the Politics of Feminine Religiosity in the Peripheries of the Japanese Empire. It examines the persecution of female spirit mediums at three sites located at the outermost edges of the Japanese empire: Okinawa, Tōhoku (in a remote region of Northeast Japan), and Cheju Island (a once colonized territory in what is now South Korea). We are extremely excited about this new project which promises to address, at the broadest level, how gender dynamics and apprehensions of geographical and cultural marginality contributed to the creation and evolution of a hierarchy of religious practices in modern Japan.
We couldn’t be more pleased that she will be teaching undergraduates, training graduate students, and pursuing her important research in our department!