Nancy Abelmann facts for kids

Nancy Abelmann (born April 24, 1959, died January 6, 2016) was an American expert who studied people and cultures. She was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, she taught about anthropology, Asian American studies, and East Asian languages. She also helped lead research and East Asian studies programs at the university.

Her Life and Studies

Education and Early Work

Nancy went to Harvard University and earned a bachelor's degree in East Asian Studies. Later, she earned her master's and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.

She was an anthropologist who focused on Korea and Korean Americans. An anthropologist studies human societies and cultures. Nancy looked into how people live in cities and how cultures change across countries. She also studied films, Asian cultures, Asian American experiences, education, and gender. Her work, along with other experts like John Lie, helped to grow the study of Korean and Asian American cultures over many years.

Nancy played a big part in starting the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Illinois. She also helped create a project called the Ethnography of the University Initiative. This project studied the university itself as a community. It was special that Nancy became almost fluent in both Japanese and Korean as an adult.

From 2012 to 2014, she was the President of a group called the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational Anthropology. This group studies how people live in cities and how cultures connect across different countries.

Awards She Won

Nancy Abelmann received several awards for her important work:

• Helen Corley Petit Professorship in 1998-99.
• The 2005 Leeds Prize from the Society of Urban and Transnational Anthropology. She won this for her book, The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Class, and Talk in Contemporary South Korea.
• The 2014 Im Seok-chae Award from the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology. This award was for the best translated book in Korean, which was her 2003 book, The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Class, and Talk in Contemporary South Korea.
• Harry E. Preble Professorship from 2007 to 2016.

Books She Wrote

Nancy Abelmann wrote or co-wrote many books, sharing her research and ideas:

• Making Family Work: How Korean American Teens and Parents Navigate Immigrant America (with Sumie Okazaki). This book looks at how Korean American teenagers and their parents manage life in America.
• South Korea’s Education Exodus: The Life and Times of Early Study Abroad (with Adrienne Lo, Soo Ah Kwon, and Sumie Okazaki). This book explores why many South Korean students go abroad to study at a young age.
• No Alternative?: Experiments in South Korean Education (co-edited with Jung-ah Choi and So Jin Park). This book discusses different approaches to education in South Korea.
• The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation. This book examines the experiences of Korean American students at universities.
• South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema (co-edited with Kathleen McHugh). This book explores old South Korean movies, focusing on gender roles and film styles.
• The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Class, and Talk in Contemporary South Korea. This book, published in 2003, was also translated into Korean in 2014.
• Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement. This book is about a social movement in South Korea.
• Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (with John Lie). This book discusses the experiences of Korean Americans during the Los Angeles Riots.