Soyeon Kim specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and culture. Her research examines how Asian and Asian American women’s fashion and beauty practices mediate the moral imperatives embedded in beauty, revealing how beauty functions as both a regulatory and generative force that structures moral hierarchies, dictates respectability, and reshapes racial and gendered norms.

Her Ph.D. dissertation, Asian/American Aesthetics: Beauty and Morality in Asian/American Literary and Visual Cultures, analyzes practices such as cosmetic surgery, makeup, fashion trends, and counterfeit luxury goods to explore how Asian and Asian American women’s bodies are shaped and reshaped in literary and visual texts. Her recent publication, “Reclaiming a Space in American History with the Collective Voices of the Japanese Picture Brides in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic,” appeared in Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics.