Jennifer Jihye Chun is Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies and Chair of International Development Studies (IDS) in the International Institute at UCLA. She is Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), where she leads the Transnational Gender and Labor Working Group, a joint initiative between the IRLE and the Center for the Study of Women (CSW)|Streisand Center.

Her research and teaching focuses on the interconnected worlds of labor, gender, race, migration, and social movements under global capitalism. Trained as a sociologist with a commitment to interdisciplinarity and ethnography, she has produced a body of scholarship that examines how workers employed on the bottom rungs of the labor market have sought to make sense of and collectively transform the unequal power dynamics that have shaped their everyday lives. Her first book, Organizing at the Margins: the Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2009), highlights the significance of the symbolic as a distinct form of worker power for women and immigrants who labor in low-paid, precarious jobs under neoliberal employment regimes. Her second book Against Abandonment: Repertoires of Solidarity in South Korean Protest (co-authored with Ju Hui Judy Han and forthcoming from Stanford University Press), follows the turn to heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in the protest repertoires of minoritized workers, especially women employed in precarious jobs. She has also written numerous articles, book chapters, and other publications about gender, migration, and care work; immigrant workers and community-based organizing; and informal and precarious labor politics. She is the co-editor of Gendering Struggles against Informal and Precarious Work (in Political Power and Social Theory), Care Work in Transition (in Critical Sociology), and Gender and Politics in Contemporary Korea (in the Journal of Korean Studies).

She received her B.A. in History at Dartmouth College, and her M.A. and PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was previously on the faculty in the Department of Sociology at The University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. While at the University of Toronto, she served as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Korea in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs.