Hyaeweol Choi has been elected to serve as vice president of the international nonprofit Association of Asian Studies. She will be the first Korean-born vice president of the organization since its founding in 1941. In this role, will join the line of succession to become president of the organization in 2024.
The association is a global non-profit organization with over 6,500 members where scholars and students share research and establish networking opportunities. The organization also offers grants and awards geared toward Asian studies.
Dr. Choi says she brings four areas of focus to the leadership of the association. First, she would like to develop inter-area, transnational, and diasporic studies. She plans to do this by cultivating active collaboration in traditional areas of humanities and social sciences as well as natural, medical, and environmental sciences. Second, Dr. Choi wants to link the academic communities in Asia, Africa, Central and South America, Oceania, and Europe to the Association of Asian Studies. Third, she wants to strengthen the variety of programs to support a younger generation of scholars. And finally, Dr. Choi wants to use diversity to reveal structural inequalities in gender, race, class, and other areas to allow for new perspectives and practices.
Dr. Choi holds the C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies at the University of Iowa. Also, she is chair of the department of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies and director of the Korean Studies Research Network at the university.
Dr. Choi joined the faculty at the University of Iowa in 2018 after teaching at the Australian National University and Arizona State University. She is the author or editor of several books including Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-era Korea (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Dr. Choi earned a bachelor’s degree in the sociocultural foundations of education and a master’s degree in the sociology of education from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. She holds a Ph.D. in international education from the University at Buffalo of the State University of New York System.