Pyong Gap Min
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Pyong Gap Min (Korean: 민병갑; born February 18, 1942) is a sociologist, currently a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Queens College, City University of New York.[1][2] He is also the Director of the Research Center for Korean Community at Queens College and a published author.[3] In 2012, he was awarded the Distinguished Career Award by the American Sociological Association.[2]
Min is a sociologist in the fields of race, immigration, ethnic identity, ethnic entrepreneurship, Korean immigration and settlement patterns, new immigrants and their religious practices, and the "comfort women" issue and redress movement for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery in the United States.[4]
Pyong Gap Min was born in a small village in Chungcheong-namdo (South Chungcheong Province) in South Korea in 1942. After completing a B.A. in history at Seoul National University (1970), he immigrated to the United States in 1972 and subsequently earned an M.A. in history at Georgia State University as well as two Ph.D. degrees from Georgia State University—one in Philosophy of Education (1979) and the second one in Sociology (1983). After being a part-time instructor and research associate at Georgia State University for a few years, he was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) in 1987, where he has continuously taught and conducted research up until the present. In 2009, he founded a non-profit academic research center called The Research Center for Korean Community (RCKC) at Queens College. He has served as the director of RCKC since its inception.[5]
Min is frequently quoted in Korean-language and English-language media outlets, both in the metropolitan New York area and South Korea. He has written seven single-authored books and has edited and co-edited fourteen anthologies. In addition, he has authored and co-authored at least 55 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals. He has also written 65 chapters included in edited volumes, and 45 book reviews in academic journals.
Sociological research
Early in his academic career, Min was a scholar of educational philosophy and was very interested in John Dewey and pragmatic ethics, as evidenced by his first two peer-reviewed journal articles. After earning his second Ph.D. (Georgia State University, 1983), his research interests shifted. The first phase of his sociological career was characterized by research on ethnic entrepreneurship, using Korean-owned small businesses as case studies. Between 1984 and 1991, he published a number of peer-reviewed articles on the topic, and in 1988, he published his first single-authored book, Ethnic Business Enterprise: Korean Small Business in Atlanta. He then published a number of articles and books related to ethnic identity, ethnic attachment, and eventually, immigrants and their religious practices. During the latter part of his career, Min became extremely interested in the Japanese military's forceful mobilization of Korean girls and young women to military brothels—widely known as the “comfort women” issue—during the Asia-Pacific War. In addition to publishing journal articles and a monograph and an edited book on the subject, he also became very involved in the redress movement for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, acting as an activist-scholar. In 2017, Min organized and hosted an international conference on the “comfort women” issue and the redress movement; he also presented a paper at the conference, which became part of an edited volume. As Korean food and popular entertainment such as K-pop and K-dramas have become increasingly popular around the world, Min has developed major interest in transnationalism. In 2022, he published his most recent monograph, Transnational Cultural Flow From Home: Korean Community in Greater New York.
