FACULTY FELLOW IN ASIAN/PACIFIC/AMERICAN STUDIES
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS | NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

I am a historian of religion, migration and citizenship, and U.S. empire, working across Asian American and Pacific Islander history, immigration and border governance, religion and American public culture, and the history of the United States in the Pacific after the Civil War. Much of my research centers on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (roughly 1870s-1920s) and the transformations in migration, federal governance, overseas expansion, and racial formation that reshaped the United States during those decades.

I am currently an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow (APFF) in Asian/Pacific/American Studies in New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. I received my PhD in the Study of Religion (fields: North American Religions & History) from Harvard University in 2026, and was a Graduate Student Associate (GSA) and a Canada Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

My research places religion within histories that are not always understood as religious: immigration law and border control, citizenship and racial classification, migration across the Pacific, and the expansion of American power overseas. Rather than treating religion as a discrete subject, I use it to illuminate institutions, networks, languages, and forms of authority that conventional accounts of the state, migration, and empire can sometimes overlook. I examine how religious actors and institutions participated in these histories—producing knowledge about migrants and foreign peoples, establishing practices of surveillance and reform, shaping ideas about civilization and belonging, and creating transpacific networks through which debates in Asia and the United States became interconnected. At the same time, I am interested in Asian and Asian American actors who appropriated, contested, and transformed the religious and political languages through which they were governed.

This approach has led me especially to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Asian migration and exclusion, Christian social reform, racial and biological classification, U.S. expansion in the Pacific, and the growth of the federal administrative state developed alongside one another. I am interested in what becomes visible when these histories—often studied separately—are reconstructed as part of the connected religio-cultural and transpacific transformation.

My first book project, “Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies: American Liberal Protestants, US Immigration Policymaking, and the Un/making of the Asian Exclusion Era, 1875-1924," reconstructs the emergence of federal immigration restriction through the intertwined histories of Asian exclusion, religious-social reform, and transpacific and bi-coastal religious and political networks. Moving from the Page Act of 1875 through the Immigration Act of 1924, the book follows missionaries, reformers, women’s organizations, denominational networks, courtrooms and congresses, immigration officials, and Asian and Asian American critics across China, California, Boston, Washington, D.C., and the broader Pacific world. By critically examining how influential ideas about Asian sexuality, domesticity, moral character, religion, race, and capacity for assimilation traveled between reform organizations, public debate, and the developing institutions of immigration administration, the book argues that the border was constructed through a much wider world of reform organizations, associational networks, cultural categories, and transpacific encounters than immigration law alone can reveal. It also recovers Asian and Asian American actors who challenged racial exclusion by appropriating and transforming the languages of equality, civilization, Christianity, and American belonging.

In doing so, Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies recasts Asian exclusion as a formative chapter not only in immigration and Asian American history but also in the making of the modern U.S. state, the transformation of American political life, and the reconfiguration of modern American Protestantism. The book argues that debates over immigration and citizenship, and over Asian migration and religious difference in particular, became an important but comparatively understudied arena in which competing Protestant understandings of race, Christian universalism, national belonging, and the relationship between religion and the state took shape. It thus places immigration alongside the theological, scientific, and social controversies more commonly associated with the emergence of the liberal-conservative divide in modern American Christianity. The book is based on my dissertation (Harvard University, 2026), advised by Catherine Brekus (chair), David F. Holland, and Erika Lee.

My other research extends outward from these histories of migration, imperialism, religion, and the Pacific. I am completing “Migration and Diaspora” for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Asian American Religions, edited by Melissa Borja, Helen Jin Kim, and Justin K. Tse and forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2027. My articles and ongoing projects examine subjects including missionary imperialism and Asian labor migration, the intersections of religion, racial science, and biological governance, immigration and border control, and Asian American religious history.

My current work also extends these questions beyond the Gilded Age and Progressive Era into the twentieth-century Pacific and its diasporas. I am beginning a second book project, Freedom’s Debtors: Christianity, Memory, and the Moral Economy of U.S. Empire in Asia. Moving across Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnamese refugee and diasporic communities, the project examines how Asian and Asian American Christian actors remembered American war, aid, liberation, and resettlement, and how those memories became competing claims about gratitude, political alliance, indebtedness, and obligation. Rather than treating these ideas simply as American exports, the project centers Asian intermediaries who actively interpreted what American “freedom” meant, what histories should be remembered, and who owed whom. Together, my first and second books examine different moments in the making and afterlives of American power across the Pacific: one through migration, exclusion, and border governance, and the other through war, liberation, memory, and political debt. More on my past and ongoing work can be found on the Research page.

At NYU, I teach courses that bring global and transnational approaches to U.S. history into conversation with Asian/Pacific/American Studies, migration and border studies, religion, race, and histories of U.S. empire. My teaching is particularly concerned with placing Asian American history and North American immigration history within larger histories of U.S. political development and the Pacific world, while showing students how categories such as race, religion, citizenship, and nation have been historically made and contested. Before joining NYU, I taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Harvard in American religious history, Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies, global Christianity, American diversity, and pedagogy. A fuller introduction to my teaching is on the Teaching section of this site.

My research has been supported by a range of internal and external fellowships, grants, and academic organizations. At Harvard, I have been awarded support from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Harvard-Weatherhead Research Cluster on Migration, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Korea Institute, and the John L. Loeb Fellowship. Externally, my research has been funded by the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative, the American Academy of Religion, and the Organization of American Historians, among others. At Harvard, I also coordinated the Asian American Pacific Islander Studies Working Group in the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights and worked extensively in undergraduate research and thesis advising.

Before Harvard, I received a BA in Sociology and Theology and a ThM in the History of Christianity from Yonsei University in Seoul. Outside my academic work, I am also a composer and music producer, writing original music for independent and nonprofit documentary projects.

NYU Faculty Page: https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/Seokweon-Jeon

* My name is pronounced [Suhg-won-jun], with ‘jun’ as in ‘sun’