Bio
Angela Yoonjeong McClean teaches courses on international and forced migration, human rights, and contemporary society in East Asia, with a particular focus on Korea. A sociologist by training, her research explores how global refugee protection frameworks are interpreted by national institutions and how these interpretations shape the lived experiences of asylum-seekers and migrants. Her current book project examines South Korea’s refugee status determination (RSD) process as a form of bureaucratic violence, arguing that rigid, security-oriented procedures displace asylum-seekers without physical movement, trapping them in cycles of waiting and precarity within national borders.
Her work has been published in International Political Sociology and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, as well as in public outlets such as The Conversation and 9Dashline. Her research has been supported by the Korea Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) at the University of California, San Diego.
Before joining Yale, she was an Assistant Professor at Indiana University - Bloomington, and previously held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Michigan and Yale. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UC San Diego, her A.M. in Regional Studies–East Asia from Harvard University, and her B.A. in East Asian Studies and American Studies from Wellesley College.