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.