Dr. Nami Kim

Nami Kim is professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Spelman College. She is the author of The Gendered Politics of the Korean Protestant Right: Hegemonic Masculinity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor (with Wonhee Anne Joh) of Feminist Praxis against U.S. Militarism (Lexington, 2019) and Critical Theology against U.S. Militarism in Asia: Decolonization and Deimperialization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Kim is serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 

Supported Project:

Dr. K. Christine Pae, Dr. Nami Kim, and Dr. Boyung Lee, “Sexual Abuse and Korean American Christian Communities”

Acknowledging the complexities of tackling sexual abuse in Korean American communities, this project brings together Korean American scholars whose work and expertise have encompassed issues ranging from gendered violence, sexuality, race, immigration, and trauma in the fields of Christian studies. The scholars will critically engage one another’s work, aiming to produce an anthology that interrogates sexual violence in Korean American Protestant churches; maps out ethics of sex with cultural and religious sensitivities; fosters intergenerational dialogue among Korean American feminist scholars of Christianity; and challenges the continuously racialized gender-based sexual violence against Asian women. Our goals are not only to study sexual abuse, co-constitutive with spiritual abuse in the Korean American Christian community but also to create educationally effective materials to eradicate the abuse. For these, the project will interrogate gender-based violence and compulsory heterosexism in the communities while critically engaging both religious studies and theological studies on the matters related to pedagogy for healing sexual trauma, justice-oriented sexual ethics, homo/transphobia, and cross-racial/intergenerational/interfaith solidarity.