Keish Kim

Dr. Keish Kim is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University Newark and an affiliate faculty in American Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar invested in queer and feminist undocumented immigrant organizing. Her research and teaching bring a transnational perspective to the study of race, gender, and citizenship in the United States with a focus on border politics. Kim’s scholarship has been published in the Disability Studies Quarterly and in Decolonial Feminist Genealogies and Futures (2025). Dr. Kim served on the steering committee of First Gen Empower BRIDGE certification program.

At the Newhouse Center, Kim will work on her first book project, Unsettling Citizenship, which is about undocumented immigrants in the United States and how their politics unsettles notions of citizenship in the 21st century. Drawing from recorded conversations and undocumented cultural productions—poetry, music, visual art, and film—I argue that undocumented resistance to criminalization becomes a powerful act of unsettling the nation itself. This project interrogates key questions in the fields of Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, and Latinx Studies by centering disability—how displaced migrants and diasporic subjects are experiencing and navigating social, political, and physical disablement. As a parallel project to her written research, Dr. Kim facilitates conversations with undocumented and formerly undocumented, or illegalized immigrant artists, activists, and thinkers through a podcast titled "A Revolutionary Love Letter."