Hyunku Kwon

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. I study the political economy of war and crisis, the historical co-evolution of the state and the market, and patterns of political polarization & racial and ethnic conflict. My work combines computational and geostatistical methods with archival research.

Drawing on historical sociology, spatial analysis, and computational methods, my recent research examines how the presence of Union troops during Reconstruction shaped the patterns of land use arrangements and labor contracts (such as plantations and sharecropping) as well as the resurgence of cotton monoculture in the postbellum U.S. South.

I received my M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and my B.A. from Yonsei University. My research has been published in the American Political Science Review and Sociological Science.

You can contact me at hkwon37@jh.edu