Clara Han
· Professor and Director of Graduate StudiesJohns Hopkins University · Medicine
Active 2004–2025
About
Clara Han is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies. She received a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and an MD from Harvard Medical School in 2007. Her academic background also includes a BA in Molecular Biology and International Affairs from Princeton University in 1997. Professor Han's research investigates the intersections of neighborhood, medical, and legal institutions, as well as intimate life, in contexts characterized by economic precarity and violence, including torture, extrajudicial killings, and war. Her work explores themes such as violence, care, urban poverty, affliction, illness experience, death, and dying, with a focus on ethnography in Latin America, the United States, and East Asia. Over more than twenty years, she has conducted research in low-income neighborhoods in Santiago, Chile, and more recently in Korea, focusing on the Korean War and the partitioning of the two Koreas. She is the author of 'Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile' and 'Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War,' both of which have received notable recognition. Her scholarship examines how economic precarity influences subjectivity, care, neglect, and memory, and how violence impacts everyday life and kinship. Professor Han is also involved in various research projects, including studies on intra-household decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic, and co-founded initiatives addressing anti-Asian violence. She is the founder and series co-editor of the anthropology series 'Thinking From Elsewhere' at Fordham University Press.
Research topics
- Computer Science
Selected publications
Inheriting War in a Form of Life
Exilium Revista de Estudos da Contemporaneidade · 2025-12-20
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingOs estudos antropológicos sobre a senilidade e a realidade clínica da demência têm questionado como a perda de memória coloca em questão a noção de pessoa baseada no reconhecimento. Na tentativa de recuperar a pessoa, os relatos etnográficos têm se centrado no cuidador como a personagem com cujas coordenadas da realidade podemos nos relacionar, pois estão situadas no tempo cronológico e podem ser moldadas dentro do gênero narrativo. Este ensaio se afasta tanto do cuidador como personagem quanto do sujeito do adoecimento como a pessoa com demência e, em vez disso, busca apresentar cenas marcadas pela aflição. Ao apresentar essas cenas em vez de narrativas bem ordenadas, elas podem nos mostrar que não podemos delimitar ou definir antecipadamente sobre o que a história “trata”: a aflição pode ser ao mesmo tempo a história da demência, a história da guerra e a história do parentesco.
Politics and care's descriptive aim
2025-07-11
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingIn the introduction to this volume, Henig, Klepal, and Žíla put forward the notion of flux in order to attend to life in the grips of chronic precarity and volatility, marked by the catastrophic violence caused by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). To engage the upheavals and dislocations that people face in BiH, they suggest that a new lexicon is required: belonging, caring, and reckoning, which, they argue, may provide a critical backpressure to dominant frameworks applied in BiH. It may indeed be helpful to ask how shifting vocabularies can open up new routes into the study of precarity and violence. Are these vocabularies deployed as a set of organising concepts? What is the relation between concepts and descriptions in the deployment of this vocabulary? Here, I respond to the three chapters centred on the notion of ‘caring’ (Helms, Hromadžić, and Gilbert) by looking closely at their descriptions and the claims made in relation to these descriptions. In particular, I am interested in what assumptions might be unearthed in these descriptions, how caring figures within each of these chapters – is it defined a priori as a particular kind of action or affect? – and how politics and care are theorised.
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2021-06-15
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingFordham University Press eBooks · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
3. Th e Difficulty of Kindness: Boundaries, Time, and the Ordinary
2020-09-30
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingFordham University Press eBooks · 2020-12-01
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingSeeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War
2020-12-01
book1st authorCorrespondingAn utterly original and illuminating work that meets at the crossroads of autobiography and ethnography to re-examine violence and memory through the eyes of a child.Seeing Like a Child is a deeply moving narrative that showcases an unexpected voice from an established researcher. Through an unwavering commitment to a child's perspective, Clara Han explores how the catastrophic event of the Korean War is dispersed into domestic life. Han writes from inside her childhood memories as the daughter of parents who were displaced by war, who fled from the North to the South of Korea, and whose displacement in Korea and subsequent migration to the United States implicated the fraying and suppression of kinship relations and the Korean language. At the same time, Han writes as an anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to the devastated worlds of her parents-to Korea and to the Korean language-allowing her, as she explains, to find and found kinship relationships that had been suppressed or broken in war and illness. A fascinating counterpoint to the project of testimony that seeks to transmit a narrative of the event to future generations, Seeing Like a Child sees the inheritance of familial memories of violence as embedded in how the child inhabits her everyday life.Seeing Like a Child offers readers a unique experience-an intimate engagement with the emotional reality of migration and the inheritance of mass displacement and death-inviting us to explore categories such as "catastrophe," "war," "violence," and "kinship" in a brand-new light
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-12-01
book1st authorCorrespondingWinner, 2022 Senior Book Prize, Association for Feminist Anthropology Finalist, 2022 Victor Turner Prize An utterly original and illuminating work that meets at the crossroads of autobiography and ethnography to re-examine violence and memory through the eyes of a child. Seeing Like a Child is a deeply moving narrative that showcases an unexpected voice from an established researcher. Through an unwavering commitment to a child’s perspective, Clara Han explores how the catastrophic event of the Korean War is dispersed into domestic life. Han writes from inside her childhood memories as the daughter of parents who were displaced by war, who fled from the North to the South of Korea, and whose displacement in Korea and subsequent migration to the United States implicated the fraying and suppression of kinship relations and the Korean language. At the same time, Han writes as an anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to the devastated worlds of her parents—to Korea and to the Korean language—allowing her, as she explains, to find and found kinship relationships that had been suppressed or broken in war and illness. A fascinating counterpoint to the project of testimony that seeks to transmit a narrative of the event to future generations, Seeing Like a Child sees the inheritance of familial memories of violence as embedded in how the child inhabits her everyday life. Seeing Like a Child offers readers a unique experience—an intimate engagement with the emotional reality of migration and the inheritance of mass displacement and death—inviting us to explore categories such as “catastrophe,” “war,” “violence,” and “kinship” in a brand-new light.
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-12-01 · 1 citations
book1st authorCorresponding
Recent grants
NIH · $252k · 2007
NSF · $122k · 2011–2014
Frequent coauthors
- 28 shared
Harri Englund
- 28 shared
Eduardo Kohn
- 25 shared
Robert Desjarlais
- 22 shared
Sarah College
University of Cambridge
- 19 shared
Amira Mittermaier
- 16 shared
Lisa Stevenson
McGill University
- 14 shared
Angela Garcia
Stanford University
- 14 shared
Didier Fassin
Institute for Advanced Study
Awards & honors
- 2022 Association for Feminist Anthropology Senior Book Prize
- Finalist for the 2022 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Wr…
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