SunAh Laybourn
Associate Professor
Dr. SunAh M. Laybourn is an Associate Professor of Sociology. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland in 2018. Her areas of interest include race and ethnicity, identity development, and Asian America/ns.
SunAh’s latest book, Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants (New York University Press, 2024) examines immigration, citizenship, and belonging through the case of Korean transnational transracial adoptees. Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United States, primarily by white families. Despite being legally adopted, Korean adoptees routinely experience refusals of belonging, whether by state agents, laws, and regulations, in everyday interactions, or even through media portrayals that render them invisible. In Out of Place, SunAh M Laybourn, herself a Korean adoptee, examines this long-term journey, with a particular focus on the race-making process and the contradictions inherent to the model minority myth.
Currently, SunAh is working two projects that examine the Asian American race-making process: 1.) Asian American in/visibility within sociological research on race and racism; and 2.) Historically Black Colleges and Universities’ enrollment of and approach towards Japanese Americans during the immediate post-internment period.
Her research has been published in Social Problems, Symbolic Interaction, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Asian Pacific American Law Journal. Her co-authored book entitled, Diversity in Black Greek-Letter Organizations: Breaking the Line, is available through Routledge (2018).