Angela Y. McClean

Angela Y. McClean joins the FAS as Lecturer in Sociology. She teaches courses on international and forced migration, as well as East Asia with a focus on Korea. Her research examines the interplay between international norms and domestic implementation, exploring how global refugee protection frameworks are interpreted by national institutions and their practical effects on the ground. Her book project conceptualizes South Korea’s refugee status determination (RSD) process as a form of bureaucratic violence, arguing that rigid and security-driven implementations displace asylum-seekers without physical movement, keeping their lives in cycles of waiting and precarity within national borders.

Her scholarship has appeared in International Political Sociology and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, as well as public outlets including 9Dashline and The Conversation. Her work has been funded by the Korea Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) at UC San Diego.

Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at Indiana University-Bloomington, a Postdoctoral Associate at the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University, and a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in Sociology from UC San Diego, an AM in Regional Studies-East Asia from Harvard University, and a BA in East Asian Studies and American Studies from Wellesley College.