Yoon Jung Park, PhD  

Dr. Yoon Jung Park is currently a freelance researcher. She is a non-resident Senior Research Associate of the Sociology Department at Rhodes University and serves as the convener/coordinator of the Chinese in Africa/Africans in China (CA/AC) International Research Working Group. She is the author of A Matter of Honour. Being Chinese in South Africa (Jacana/Lexington Books) and numerous other articles and book chapters in scholarly publications including Les Temps Modernes, African Studies, and the Journal of Chinese Overseas.

Her current research interests include Chinese migrants in southern Africa and perceptions of the Chinese by local communities; migration; race, ethnicity and identity; race, class and power dynamics; and xenophobia. She also has done work on issues of gender and gender-based violence in the US and South Africa, international development, and arts & culture.

Dr. Park has a PhD from University of the Witwatersrand (Sociology); an MA from Fletcher School at Tufts University (International Relations); and a BA from Pitzer College (Sociology and Women’s Studies).  

She is married and has a 9-year-old daughter. She was born in Seoul, Korea; grew up in Los Angeles, CA; lived in Africa (Johannesburg and Nairobi) between 1995 and 2010; and recently moved back to the US, settling in the Washington, DC area. She has also lived, for brief periods, in Cuernavaca, Mexico; Boston, Massachusetts; and San Jose, Costa Rica. She speaks English and Spanish fluently, kitchen Korean, and smatterings of Kiswahili and IsiZulu.