Mary Shin Kim

Mary Shin Kim is a Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (EALL) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her academic career spans multiple institutions, including University of California, Los Angeles (PhD, MA) and Ewha Woman’s University (BA in Political Science).

Research Interests

Her research focuses on:

• Interactional Linguistics
• Conversation Analysis
• Korean Pragmatics
• Second Language Pedagogy

She investigates how language structures social interaction in both everyday and institutional settings, with particular attention to multimodal organization and interactional competence.

Publication Trends

Her recent work analyzes:

• Politeness in online/offline Korean discourse
• Discourse particles and their positional variability
• Stance alignment mechanisms
• Repair initiators in interaction
• Pragmatic functions of grammatical elements

Scientific Awards

• 2017 – Junior/Mid-Career Faculty Excellence in Scholarship & Research Award (College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature)
• 2023 – Presidential Citation for Meritorious Teaching Award (UHM)

Teaching Activities

Professor Kim teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses including:

• KOR 623 – Interdisciplinary Research in Korean
• KOR 634 – Korean Sociolinguistics
• KOR 401 – Fourth Level Korean
• KOR 470 – Language and Culture of Korea