Hyunku Kwon studies the political economy of war and crisis, the historical co-evolution of the state and the market, and patterns of political polarization and racial and ethnic conflict. His work combines computational and geostatistical methods with archival research. 

Drawing on historical sociology, spatial analysis, and computational methods, his recent research examines how the presence of Union troops during Reconstruction shaped the patterns of land use arrangements and labor contracts as well as the resurgence of cotton monoculture in the postbellum U.S. South.