Media Coverage:
"How Heangjin Park Uses Food to Understand the World," LMU Newsroom, Nov 30, 2022.
"What is Economic Anthropoogy? with Heangjin Park," Mergers and Acquisitions: Exchanges in and beyond Economic Anthropology (Podcast), Jan 2, 2023.
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where I also served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and the College. My research and teaching focus on the global circulation of commodities, industrial food production and distribution, and nationalism in contemporary Northeast Asia.
Drawing from my ethnographic research at a kimchi company in China, I am currently working on a monograph titled Transnationally Korean: Diasporic Visions of Kimchi and Nationalism. As a visual anthropologist, I blend photography, ethnographic film, and media analysis to explore the aesthetic configuration of cultures and nations. This approach is evident in my article on Anthropology and Photography and my documentary Chejian, or Between Vehicles (currently in post-production). I also co-lead the collaborative research project "Logistics in the Making of Mobile Worlds," developing interdisciplinary and experimental research on logistics and mobility. My research was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Paulson Institute, University of Chicago Center in Beijing, the Center for East Asian Studies and the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, and Center for Asian Business at Loyola Marymount University.
I have taught Anthropology, Transnational Asian Studies, and Food Studies courses at Loyola Marymount University and the University of Chicago. Students in my courses have developed creative ethnographic projects, which you can see here.
