Seokweon Jeon

Seokweon Jeon

PhD Candidate
North American Religions
Seokweon Jeon pic

Seokweon Jeon is a PhD candidate in the Study of Religion and a Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. As a religious historian of modern America with a particular emphasis on 'MBC' (migration, borders, and citizenship), Asian America, and US imperialism, his research focuses on the religious dimension of U.S. immigration policy, the religious (re)construction of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian rhetoric, and the religious-racial underpinnings of the expansion of meritocracy.

Seokweon is currently writing a dissertation entitled “Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies: American Liberal Protestants, US Immigration Policymaking, and the Fashioning of Asians as 'Undesirables,' 1882-1924.” This project delves into the influence of American liberal Protestants on racially restrictive and religiously selective US immigration policies by retracing the processes through which immigrants from Asia, from the postbellum period through the early-twentieth century, were labeled as 'undesirable' immigrants. Using this era’s political, cultural, and religious constructions of 'desirability' and 'undesirability' of immigrants (specifically, Asians) as a prism, his dissertation aims 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 earlier forms of anti-Asian rhetoric. For the academic year 2023-24, his dissertation research is funded by the John L. Loeb Fellowship and the Harvard-Weatherhead Research Cluster on Migration Doctoral Fellowship.

Since 2020, Seokweon is also serving as a student leader for the Asian American Pacific Islander Studies Working Group at Harvard’s EMR (Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights). He holds a BA (Sociology, Theology) and ThM (History of Christianity) from Yonsei University, Seoul, and an MTS (Religion and the Social Sciences) from Harvard Divinity School.

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