Pyong Gap Min

Pyong Gap Min is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center. He also serves as Director of the Research Center for Korean Community at Queens College. Dr. Min's areas of interest include immigration, ethnic identity, ethnic business, immigrants’ religious practices, and family/gender, with a special focus on Asian/Korean Americans. He is the author of six books, five of them focusing on Korean immigrants’ experiences. They include Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in New York and Los Angeles (1996), the winner of two national book awards, and Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America: Korean Protestants and Indian Hindus across Generations (2010), the winner of three national book awards, one in Korea and the other two in the United States. His last book is Korean Comfort Women: Military Brothel, Brutality, and the Redress Movement published just this year.

Dr. Min's fourteen edited and co-edited books include Encyclopedia of Racism in the United States, 3 volumes (2005) and Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues, the Second Edition (2006). He was a Russell Sage Foundation fellow in 2006-2007, for writing his 2008 book, Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival: Korean Greengrocers in New York City. He received the Distinguished Career Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association in 2012 and the Contribution to the Field Award from the Section on Asia and Asian America of the American Sociological Association in 2019.

Korean “Comfort Women”: Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement

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Korean “Comfort Women” synthesizes the previous major findings about Japanese military sexual slavery and legal recommendations, and provides new findings about the issues “comfort women” faced for an English-language audience. It also examines the transnational redress movement, revealing that the Japanese government has tried to conceal the crime of sexual slavery and to resolve the women’s human rights issue with diplomacy and economic power.

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Koreans in North America: Their Twenty-First Century Experiences

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Pyong Gap Min, Editor of Koreans in North America, will discuss this new and only anthology of  Koreans’ experiences in the U.S. and Canada. Topics covered include Koreans’ immigration and settlement patterns, changes in Korean immigrants’ business patterns, Korean immigrant churches’ social functions, differences between Korean immigrant intact families and geese families, transnational ties, second-generation … Read more

Patterns of Intermarriage and Cross-generational In-marriage Among Native-born Asian Americans

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This article examines patterns of post-1965 native-born Asian Americans’ intermarriages and cross-generational in-marriages using a combined sample of the 2001-2006 American Community Surveys from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series. The analysis focuses on ethnic and gender differences in intermarriage and cross-generational in-marriage rates and patterns. About 55% of native-born Asian Americans are found to … Read more

Intergenerational Transmission of Religion and Ethnicity: Indian Hindus and Korean Protestants

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This is a book project that compares Indian Hindus and Korean Protestants in their intergenerational transmission of religion and ethnicity through religion. It is based on several data sources: (1) ethnographic research on a Hindu temple and a Korean Protestant church in Queens, New York City, (2) personal interviews with Indian Hindu and Korean Protestant … Read more

Societal Changes and Transformations of Families in South Korea

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South Korea achieved urbanization and industrialization with a faster speed than any other country in the world; it was transformed from a predominantly agrarian society in 1960 to a premier postindustrial society in 2000. This presentation will take a comprehensive overview of the changes in family system in South Korea affected by societal changes between … Read more

A Comparison on Chinese, Indian, and Korean Immigrants in New York in Ethnic Attachment and Solidarity

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Based on a book currently being written for Columbia University on ethnic attachment, this talk will explain the solidarity among Chinese, Indian and Korean immigrants in New York City. Sociologists often lump together ethnic attachment and ethnic solidarity into the same category. Though distinctively interrelated, both are significantly different from one another in their explanations … Read more