Sangmi Lee

Sangmi Lee is a sociocultural anthropologist and ethnographer whose research broadly engages with the scholarship on diaspora, migration, and transnationalism and is based on qualitative and ethnographic field methods. She received her D.Phil. in anthropology in 2016 from the University of Oxford, U.K.

Her previous research examined how Hmong living in the diaspora have maintained extensive kinship networks and various cultural and economic practices across national borders despite the uncertainty about the location of ancestral homeland while also experiencing ethnic cultural differences based on their "partial" national affiliations. For this project, she conducted comparative, long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Hmong communities in central Laos and the United States (California). Her first book, Reclaiming Diasporic Identity: Transnational Continuity and National Fragmentation in the Hmong Diaspora (University of Illinois Press 2024), as well as other publications are based on this research and provide a comparative and transnational perspective.

For her current project, Sangmi is conducting research on the descendants of the Korean diaspora, born and/or raised abroad, who return to their ethnic homeland of South Korea to pursue college (or graduate) degrees. She is especially interested in the factors that motivate these ethnic return migrant students to pursue the “Korean Dream” through education and how their experiences vary according to the hierarchical global positioning of their countries of origin. She is also interested in the extent to which such different educational and living experiences in the ethnic homeland (especially between those from the "Global North" versus "Global South") shape their ethnic and national identities and eventually lead to their decisions to stay in Korea (or return home) upon completion of their degrees. Based on her pilot research in the summer of 2024, Sangmi will be conducting long term ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea for this project.

As sociocultural anthropologist, Sangmi also has a wide range of interests about topics related to “culture” and identities. She teaches introductory cultural anthropology, qualitative research methods, and courses related to migration, transnationalism, nationalism, and identity.