Featured Student
Ph.D. candidate Diana Kim is the co-winner of the 2011 Law and Social Inquiry graduate student prize for best journal-length paper in the field of socio-legal studies. In "The Story of the Tattooed Lady: Scandal and the Colonial State in British Burma," she recounts Branded Woman vs. Unknown, an unusual trial that gave birth to a Burmese tattoo's "ordinarily accepted significance" in the summer of 1889. What began as a snippet of gossip from a local village in Burma became a public scandal involving the highest echelon of the British colonial state. Utilizing primary documents, Diana's forthcoming article explains why this dynamic of escalation occurred and how colonial officials resolved the scandal by asserting authorship over the public fact of tattoos in Burma. The argument that this process—shaped through cues from a highly fragmented audience of peers—represents the construction of an elite public transcript carries broader implications for scholarship on colonial state-making, the construction of legal "facts," and the politics of scandals.
Diana's broader research interests weave together an empirical focus on East and Southeast Asia with theories of colonial rule, state-society relations, and the sociology of punishment and danger. She is currently writing a dissertation entitled States of Vice (Dissertation Committee: Bernard Harcourt, Andrew Abbott, Dan Slater), which examines the politics of opium and colonial state-making through a comparative historical analysis of British Burma, French Laos, Siam, and Yunnan China (1870-1935).
