Seokweon Jeon is a PhD candidate in the Study of Religion (fields: North American Religions & History) and a Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Seokweon is a religious historian of modern America with a particular emphasis on ‘MBC’ (migration, borders, and citizenship), Asian America, and US imperialism. His research primarily focuses on the roles religion and Asian migration have played in shaping the modern American understandings of the border, citizenship, and national belonging.
His dissertation, titled “Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies: American Liberal Protestants, US Immigration Policymaking, and the Fashioning of Asians as “Undesirables,” 1882-1924,” critically examines the influence of American liberal Protestants on racially restrictive and religiously selective US immigration policies by focusing on the processes through which immigrants from Asia were labeled as the “undesirable.” Focusing on the critical years between 1882 and 1924, a period marked by the establishment of the nation’s (arguably) earliest and most severe immigration restrictions, this dissertation shows how American liberal Protestant individuals, churches, and organizations shaped the evolving legal and societal definitions of “good” and “bad,” “beneficial” and “unbeneficial,” and “deserving” and “undeserving” immigrants. Ultimately, his project seeks to show that religion was not incidental to, but rather constitutive of, the creation and expansion of an oppressive system of immigration control and the (re)construction of anti-Asian rhetoric from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.
Seokweon’s work has been supported by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, John L. Loeb Fellowship, the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI), the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and the Organization of American Historians (OAH), among others.
At Harvard, Seokweon has worked closely with Harvard’s Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights where he served as a coordinator for the Asian American Pacific Islander Studies Working Group and taught an entry-level AAPI studies course for two years. And he is currently holding a position as a Doctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Weatherhead Research Cluster on Migration. He holds a BA (Sociology, Theology) and ThM (History of Christianity) from Yonsei University, Seoul, and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School.