Da In Choi is a scholar and educator of gender, labor, and class in South Korea and diasporic spaces in the US. She completed her PhD in Gender Studies at UCLA with concentration in Asian American Studies in 2026. She received her MA in Regional Studies - East Asia from Harvard University and BA in History and English Literature from Queen's University. 

At Rice, Da In will advance her book project, Essential yet Expendable, which examines family as a social institution that created gendered and disposable labor during the period of rapid social, economic, and political changes in postwar South Korea. By assembling an archive of singmo (domestic servants)'s first-person narratives through oral histories, memoirs, and documentaries, this project argues that the story of South Korea's industrial development in the 1960s and 1970s cannot be separated from the role of rural and urban families in circulating and extracting from poor young girls' domestic labor. However, family was also a site of resistance: the narratives produced by singmo demonstrate creative strategies to counter labor control, form horizontal networks of kinship, and envision alternative means of thriving beyond survival. Da In will also begin work on her second book project that examines the history of domestic workers-led social movements in the US, foregrounding the knowledge of workers as experts on the interconnected issues of gender, labor, and migration. It builds on her work with the California Domestic Workers' Coalition (CDWC) and the UCLA Labor Center to evaluate the impact of worker-centered education and outreach strategies through community engaged research methods. 

Da In's work has been supported by SSHRC, Korea Foundation, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Harvard's Korea Institute, Frank Knox Memorial, among others. Her publications on the politics of domestic work, social reproduction, and kinship can be found in Journal of Women's History, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Yŏsŏng Irŏn (Feminist Theory) in Korean.