Rate My Professor Hyun Jin Kim

Hyun Jin Kim serves as Professor in Classics in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne. He commenced his position in the Classics and Archaeology discipline in 2013 as an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA) Fellow, having previously held a University of Sydney Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from 2009 to 2012. Kim holds a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in Classics from the University of Oxford. His distinguished academic career led to his promotion to full Professor in November 2023.

Professor Kim's research specializations encompass ancient history, classics, late antiquity, the Huns and Xiongnu, Steppe empires, ethnic identities and the 'barbarian' in classical Greece and early China, geopolitical revolutions, and Eurasian interconnectivity. Prominent projects include 'The Transfer of Global Hegemony: Geopolitical Revolutions in World History,' 'The Political Organization of Steppe Empires and their Contribution to Eurasian Interconnectivity: the Case of the Huns and their Impact on the Frankish West,' 'The Emergence of the Barbarian,' 'Why Coins Turned Round the World Over?: A Critical Analysis of the Origins and Transmission of Ancient Metallic Money,' 'The Identity of the Huns,' and 'The Origins of Complex Political Organisation in Ancient Inner Asia, East Eurasia: Cimmerians and Scythians.' His major publications comprise Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China (2009), The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013), The Huns (Routledge, 2016), Eurasian Empires in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Contact and Exchange between the Graeco-Roman World, Inner Asia and China (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Geopolitics in Late Antiquity: The Fate of Superpowers from China to Rome (Routledge, 2018), Rome and China: Points of Contact (Routledge, 2021), and South Korea's Origins and Early Relations with the United States: The Lynchpin of Hegemonic Power (Routledge, 2022). Kim's scholarship has profoundly shaped understandings of nomadic impacts on ancient civilizations and cross-cultural exchanges. In 2019, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA).