John SW Park is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and an affiliated faculty member in Law and Society and in Sociology. He serves as an Assistant Dean in the College of Letters and Science. Prior to his appointment at UCSB, he served for two years as an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He was an Assistant Professor at UCSB from 2002 to 2005. He completed his Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Boalt Hall, the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. He has a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and he also graduated summa cum laude from Berkeley with a degree in Rhetoric. He worked for a year at an immigration law firm in San Francisco before completing his Ph.D.

Professor Park writes and teaches on topics in race theory, immigration law and policy, and Anglo-American legal and political theory. He published Elusive Citizenship, a book with NYU Press on the philosophical and legal justifications for federal immigration law, as well as the law’s subsequent impact on Asian Americans. He has also published another book, Probationary Americans, concerning contemporary immigration rules and American race theory; this one was co-authored with his older brother, Edward Park, who is the Director of the Asian Pacific American Studies Program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is currently collecting materials for a definitive casebook on Asian American Legal History. Professor Park has also published articles and reviews in The Michigan Journal of Race and Law, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, The Journal of Asian American Studies (with Edward), The New Centennial Review, The American Historical Review, and The Law and History Review. His research has been supported by fellowships and awards from the University of California and the University of Texas. With Edward, he was also a recipient of a generous grant from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Project.

At Cal, UT, and UCSB, Professor Park has offered or will offer the following courses: Asian American Legal History; Korean American History; Chinese American History; Colonialism and Migration; Contemporary Legal Issues in Asian American Communities; Law and Politics; Race and Law; and Jurisprudence. All of his courses are taught from interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from philosophy, law, public policy, and Asian American history.

Professor Park is married to Gowan Lee, and they have three children, Zoe, Isabel, and Sophie. When he had free time, he used to fish (with Edward), watch lots of movies, and read lots of books, mostly on Greek and Roman history, European history and philosophy, and East Asian history and philosophy. Now he mostly hangs out with Gowan and the kids. Gowan took this nice picture of him in the Santa Fe National Forest.

For students enrolled in Asian American Studies 115, please click here. For students enrolled in the Freshman Seminar on Race and Law, please click here.