Daniel Y. Kim's primary research field is post-1945 U. S. literature with a particular focus on the Asian American and African American traditions, Korean/American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cold War.

He is the author of Reading Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford University Press, 2005) and . This book examines literary representations of racialized masculinity, and it is the first study to do so in a comparative African-American and Asian-American context. Through detailed analyses of two exemplary figures, it identifies a gendered and sexualized rhetoric that both black and Asian male writers have drawn upon to depict the violent psychic effects of white racism on men of color; it also brings into focus the persistent and seductive belief that the domain of literature provides a measure of mobility from the repressive constructions of minority identity that prevail in a racist order. This study like much recent work that has been generated at the intersections of feminist, gender, gay/lesbian and ethnic studies illuminates the intimate relationship between the various modalities of identity that exert an essentializing power in the production of modern subjectivity: race, gender and sexuality. Its particular contributions to this body of work stem from its comparative scope and the specific emphasis it places on literary ideology—on how a sexual and racial politics of identity becomes articulated as a literary politics.
 

The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War (NYU Press, 2020), his second book, adopts a more historical approach. Drawing on both the affective and historiographical resonances of the term "intimacies," it illuminates how the so-called “forgotten war” was a watershed event that fundamentally reshaped both domestic conceptions of race and the interracial dimensions of the global empire that the United States would go on to establish. Addressing a range of American popular media from the 1950s, it offers a portrait of the Korean War as it looked to Americans while they were experiencing it in real time. It also reads a constellation of fiction from US writers like Susan Choi, Rolando Hinojosa, Toni Morrison, and Chang-rae Lee, and the Korean author Hwang Sok-yong. The multiple and ongoing historical trajectories presented in these works testify to the resurgent afterlife of this event in US cultural memory, and of its lasting impact on multiple racialized populations, both within the US and in Korea. 

Norman Freehling Visiting Fellowship, the Institute for the Humanities, the University of Michigan, Fall 2019

Presidential Faculty Research Fellowship, Pembroke Center, Brown University, 2017-18

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2013

Cogut Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, Brown University, 2006

Henry Merritt Wriston Faculty Fellowship, Brown University, 2000-01

Presidential Faculty Research Fellowship, Pembroke Center, Brown University, 1998-99

“Translations and Ghostings of History: The Novels of Han Kang,” New Literary History 51, no. 2 (July 15, 2020): 375–99

“The Borderlands of the Korean War and the Fiction of Rolando Hinojosa,” positions: asia critique 23.4 (2015) 665-694

“Nationalist Technologies of Cultural Memory and the Korean War: Militarism and Neo-Liberalism in The Price of Freedom and the War Memorial of Korea,” Cross-Currents 4.1 (2015) 40-70 — also translated and republished in Korean by Zinzin Press

"'Bled in Letter by Letter': Translation, Postmemory and the Subject of Korean War History in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student," American Literary History 21.3 (Fall 2009)

"Once More With Feeling: Cold War Masculinity and the Sentiment of Patriotism in John Okada's No-No Boy" Criticism 47.1

"Do I, Too, Sing America? Vernacular Representations and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker" Journal of Asian American Studies 6.3

"The Strange Love of Frank Chin," Q&A: Queer in Asian America, ed. David L. Eng and Alice Hom, Temple UP

"Invisible Desires: Homoerotic Racism and its Homophobic Critique in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man," Novel 30

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2013

Cogut Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, Brown University, 2006

Henry Merritt Wriston Faculty Fellowship, Brown University, 2000-01

Presidential Faculty Research Fellowship, Pembroke Center, Brown University, 1998-99

Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, U.C. Berkeley, 1995-96

U.C. President's Fellowship (Graduate Mentorship Award), 1989-93

Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities (Honorary), 1989

Phi Beta Kappa (University of Michigan), 1987