Faculty Profile - Kimberly McKee
Dr. Kimberly McKee
she/her
Director, School of Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor
Email: [email protected]
Office: LOH 324B
Phone: 616-331-8196
Bio
Kimberly D. McKee is professor and director of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University. She is the author of Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood (The Ohio State University Press, 2023) and Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2019), as well as the co-editor of Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Her interdisciplinary scholarship critically interrogates the ways transnational adoption calls attention to and intervenes in discourses concerning citizenship, kinship, multiculturalism through an analysis of literature, film, and television. She is attentive to the ways dominant narratives of adoption and kinship circulate in popular culture and inform societal perceptions of adoptees and their realities. Currently, she is working on a book of essays exploring motherhood and adoption. McKee serves on the executive committee for the Alliance of the Study of Adoption and Culture. McKee was a US Fulbright Scholar to South Korea (Sogang University) in 2023-2024. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for Humanities Common Heritage Grant and funding from Michigan Humanities. Previously, she served as the assistant director / secretary for KAAN (the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network) from 2014 - 2020 and on the organization's advisory council from 2011 - 2016. She also is one of the co-organizers for the International Symposium on Korean Adoption Studies, which coincides with the International Korean Adoptee Associations (IKAA) Gathering
Areas of Interest
Critical Adoption Studies; Asian American Studies; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Critical Ethnic Studies; American Studies; Cultural Studies
Education
2013 Ph.D., Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University
2007 M.Sc., Gender and Social Policy, The London School of Economics
2005 B.A., International Affairs, The George Washington University
PUBLICATIONS
McKee, Kimberly. Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2023).
McKee, Kimberly, and Denise A. Delgado, eds. Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2020).
McKee, Kimberly. Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2019).
EXTERNAL GRANTS (DIRECTED)
2020 Great Michigan Read Action Grant, Michigan Humanities (Awarded January 2020) ($750)
2018 – 2019 Third Coast Conversations Grant, Michigan Humanities (Awarded April 2018) ($6,994)
2018 – 2019 Common Heritage Grant, National Endowment for the Humanities (Stories of Summer project with Saugatuck-Douglas History Center, Saugatuck-Douglas, MI) (Awarded December 2017) ($12,000)
Curriculum Vitae
Website
https://mckeekimberly.com/
@adopteekilljoy on Instagram