Jina B. Kim is an Atlanta native and 2007 graduate of Agnes Scott College.  She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Women’s Studies and English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and, prior to that, a printmaker and book artist.  Broadly, Jina researches contemporary ethnic U.S. literatures, women-of-color feminisms, disability studies, urban sociology and the public humanities.  Her dissertation examines how multi-ethnic U.S. literatures and cultures situated in post-Reagan cities—fictional, visual, and autobiographical—recuperate the maligned condition of public dependency.  Drawing together ethnic literary, disability, women-of-color feminist, and urban studies, it re-conceptualizes the pathologized cityscape disabled by anti-welfare policy and positions dependency as an underexplored yet vital analytic for ethnic American cultural critique.

Jina has delivered papers at the American Studies Association, the Society for Disability Studies, the National Women’s Studies Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley. Her work has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly and is forthcoming in the anthology Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities (University of Nebraska Press).  In 2012, she received the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies.