Sonia Ryang does not formally belong to the anthropology department and therefore, she doesn’t accept anthropology graduate students.
Sonia Ryang was born in Japan to Korean parents and grew up bilingual in Korean and Japanese. She earned her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and held a Research Fellowship at the Research School for Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, before joining Johns Hopkins University as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. She later moved to the University of Iowa as the C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair of Korean Studies and Professor of Anthropology. In 2014, she came to Rice University as Director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies, and after six years in that role, joined the Department of Transnational Asian Studies, her current academic home. She also served as President of the Society for East Asian Anthropology from 2020 to 2022.
Trained as a social anthropologist, Ryang began her career researching the Korean minority in Japan, a focus that continues to inform her scholarship. Over time, her intellectual scope has broadened to address a wide range of conceptual and ontological questions about human existence. Her work engages themes such as transnational migration, diaspora, totalitarianism, ideology, language, love (romantic and otherwise), food, ethnographic writing, and, more recently, “horror.” Across these diverse subjects, her scholarship is united by a central concern: examining the socio-historical functions and materiality of the ideas, rules, codes, and institutions that humans have created and subjected themselves to—while recognizing that imagination and creativity can produce not only ingenuity but also profound errors and losses. Ryang’s work is inherently interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary, with Korea (North and South) and Japan, including the Korean diaspora in Japan, as its primary geographic anchors.
Her research has been supported by major grants, including the National Science Foundation (Proposal ID: BCS-1357207), which funded her study of how language functions to create truth in North Korea. This project culminated in her book Language and Truth in North Korea (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021), which received the 2023 Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies.
BOOKS
Language and Truth in North Korea
Sonia Ryang
Eating Korean in America: Korean Food and Globalization
Sonia Ryang
Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry
Sonia Ryang
Writing Selves in Diaspora: Ethnography of Autobiographics of Korean Women in Japan and the US
Sonia Ryang
Love in Modern Japan
Sonia Ryang
Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique
Sonia Ryang
North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, and Identity
Sonia Ryang
EDITED VOLUMES
Diaspora Without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan.
Sonia Ryang and John Lie (editors)
North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding
Sonia Ryang (editor)
Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin
Sonia Ryang (editor)