Miliann Kang

Miliann Kang is affiliated faculty in Sociology and part of the Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a B.A. in Social Studies, and she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University. She studies Asian American feminisms, immigrant women’s work and labor issues, race and reproductive politics, and gender, work and family issues in transnational contexts. Her areas of expertise include feminist ethnography, contemplative pedagogies in the feminist classroom and publicly-engaged research and university diversity and inclusion efforts.

Her book, The Managed Hand: Race, Gender and the Body in Beauty Service Work (University of California Press, 2010), examines migrant women’s labor and the social interactions that occur in Asian-owned New York nail salons growing world of the beauty service industry. The book sheds light on the complex racialized and gendered processes at work in the growing beauty service industry. It won four book awards from the American Sociological Association (Sections on Racial and Ethnic Minorities; on Sex and Gender; on Race, Gender, and Class; and on Asia/Asian America) and the Sara Whaley book prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. Kang’s new book project, entitled Mother Other: Race and Reproductive Politics in Asian America (under contract with University of California Press) explores the racial politics of mothering and the work and family issues at play for Asian American women. Kang’s other work has appeared in Gender, Work, and Organization, Women and Environments, Contexts, Meridians and Gender and Society.

In 2017 and 2018, Kang was a Fulbright Senior Scholar with Ewha University and a Korea Foundation Fellow with Seoul National University, researching work and family issues for Asian and Asian American women in transnational contexts. Her research has also been supported by the Worldwide University Network, the American Association of University Women, the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Asian American Studies at UMass Boston, the Labor Relations and Research Center at UMass Amherst, and the Social Science Research Council.