Ki-Eun Jang

Adjunct Instructor

Ki-Eun Jang is an interdisciplinary scholar focusing on religion, history, literature, and the construction of social identities in the ancient and modern worlds and is a Ph.D. candidate at New York University. Her scholarly training and research engage the social world of the ancient Middle East that produced the Hebrew Bible and our intellectual legacy of modernity that shapes the ways in which we conceived of the past. Her dissertation, The Sociology of "Gentilics" in Biblical and Northwest Semitic Literature investigates the identification category, conventionally called "gentilics" in the history of ideas and in the ancient contexts respectively to unravel the tension between the term's conceptual history and an ancient logic of identification arising from different premises. To that end, she examines the role of racial thinking in the history of the humanities and the influence of such an intellectual paradigm on the interpretation of received materials from antiquity. Her dissertation work has been supported by the Louisville Institue's Dissertation Fellowship (2019-20) and the University of Notre Dame's Residential Fellowship at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute (2019-20). In 2019, she received the Emerging Scholars Fellowship Award in Hebrew Bible from the Catholic Biblical Association of America. 

 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.