Dr. Choi is C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies. Her research interests are in the areas of gender, religion and transnational history. She has published books and articles on such topics as the genealogy of modern womanhood that emerged from the encounters between Koreans and American Protestant missionaries in the early twentieth century (Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways, 2009), the historical development of the “New Woman” in colonial-era Korea (New Women in Colonial Korea, 2013), the evolution of the concept of "domesticity" within the context of encounters between Christian missionaries and women in Asia and the Pacific (co-ed., Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific, 2014), and an integrated history of gender in East Asia (co-author, Gender in Modern East Asia, 2016). She is completing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Home/Away from Home: Gender and Transnational Mobility in the Making of Modern Korea, reexamining the modern history of women in Korea from a transnational perspective by focusing on the dynamic flow of ideas, materials, and people across national boundaries that have triggered new gender images and bodily practices.

Her more recent research focuses on the fluid boundaries between the sacred and the secular, religion and emotional communities, the role of religions in public life, and the intersections of food, body, and spirituality in the age of globalization.