As a scholar working at the intersection of race, migration, and the built environment, I am intellectually invested in expanding the scope of postcolonial urban studies by exploring what Edward Said phrases as "overlapping territories" and "intertwined histories" across seemingly discrete geographic entities. As an architectural historian with an ethnographic disposition, my research examines transnational connections of ideas and things which have received little scholarly attention in architectural and urban history. Rather than viewing the study of colonial racism either as an ahistorical or aspatial field, my research approaches race and empire as inherent in contemporary global urbanism. In my work, I situate East Asia’s colonial space, which is arguably absent in postcolonial urban studies, in the global circuits of urban ideas and forms which circulate race and racism across continents. By examining transnational trajectories of traveling architecture and urban forms, such as movings ships, treaty ports, shophouses, Chinatowns, elevated highways, cemeteries, and mosques, my work interrogates plural histories of racism and its spatial entanglements.

Archives of Race, Migration, and Architecture

What is it that makes architecture and urban forms move across regions? How does a particular architectural or urban form (developed to serve functions specific to a certain locality) cross geographic boundaries and acquire different meaning as it travels? Drawing from critical archive studies and postcolonial studies, I examine transnational flows of architecture and urban forms with a particular emphasis on cross-imperial circuits of people, things, and ideas. I emphasize architecture's dual function: as a reflection of racial imaginings at a given historical time and as a conduit for the transmission of these imaginings across borders. The examples include, but are not limited to, traveling ideas of Chinatown, transoceanic circulations of urban models across port cities, global transfers of urban renewal in the 1960s, and Cold War linkages in the construction of mosques in non-Muslim cities. ​

Related research:

Sujin Eom. 2024. "Fugitive Archives: Architecture, Police Photography, and Decolonial Futures." Critical Asian Studies 56 (4): 576-601. (Link)

Sujin Eom. 2023. "Bulldozing the Dead: Chinese, Citizenry, and Cemetery in Postcolonial South Korea." Modern Asian Studies 57 (1): 53-69. (Link) ​

Sujin Eom. 2019. "The Idea of Chinatown: Rethinking Cities from the Periphery." On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method, edited by Jesook Song and Laam Hae. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 21-42. (Link) 

Sujin Eom. 2019. "After Ports Were Linked: Paradoxes of Transpacific Connectivity in the 19th Century." Imaginaries of Connectivity and Creation of Novel Spaces of Governance, edited by Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Suvi Alt, and Maarten Meijer. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 67-87. (Link)

Sujin Eom. 2017. "Traveling Chinatowns: Mobility of Urban Forms and Asia in Circulation." positions: asia critique 25 (4): 693-716. (Article) ​​

Asian American Architecture 

My research in this area investigates Asian American architectural histories, with a focus on American architects of Korean descent at midcentury. In this work, I seek to revisit midcentury modern architecture by shedding light on underexamined roles of Asian American architects in its development.   

Related research:

Sujin Eom (with Sean H. McPherson). 2023. "Korean American Architects and Designers.” SAH-Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Initiative: Rediscovering Asian American and Pacific Islander Architects & Designers, edited by Gail Dubrow, Sean H. McPherson, and Yao-Fen You. A project report on AAPI architecture submitted to Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, 104-126​. (Link) ​

Sujin Eom (with Sean H. McPherson). "Conservation of Korean American Architecture and Architectural Archives.” Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation and the Built Environment ​13 (1). In Press. 

Sujin Eom. "Asian American Midcentury: Race and Body in Modern Architecture" (In Preparation)

Aesthetics and Politics of Infrastructure

My research in this area explores the paradoxical role of infrastructure in the making of modern states. Highlighting the political agency of nonhuman actors in the imagining of modern (or "civilized" as it was understood in the late 19th century) nations, my research delves into the ambiguous nature of technology in statecraft both in colonial and postcolonial contexts. I am particularly interested in "elevated highways" as an example of urban infrastructure traveling across geographies while reshaping spaces of inclusion and exclusion in urban space. 

Related research:

Sujin Eom. 2020. "Infrastructures of Displacement: The Transpacific Travel of Urban Renewal during the Cold War." Planning Perspectives ​35 (2): 299-319. (Link)
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Sujin Eom. "Bridge on Ground: Elevated Highways and the Materiality of Postcolonial Statecraft." (In Preparation)