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The intersections of women, labor, and capitalism in South Korea and a comparative analysis of Cold War-era popular culture, gender, and society in East Asian countries. 

Instructor in History

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My primary research projects have focused on the intersections of women, labor, and capitalism in South Korea and a comparative analysis of Cold War-era popular culture, gender, and society in East Asian countries. Currently, I am writing a book manuscript, entitled "Reimagining Cold War Domesticity: South Korean (De)Housewifization, Family Economy, and Consumer Capitalism," about the economic and cultural history of postwar South Korean domesticity, which considers how the transnational gendering processes of domesticity shaped to naturalize and produce derivatives in relation to class stratification, state, culture, and economy. I want my research to reframe Cold War-era historical narratives by focusing on women's labor and the family unit, demystifying the hegemonic place the U.S. occupies within Korean and East Asian history during the Cold War. The second book project will expand my research interests in gender history into transnational, cultural, and economic dimensions and investigate women's work in the private education industry in Korean diaspora communities in the U.S. and other Asian countries.

BIOGRAPHY

Since earning my Ph.D. in modern Korean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I have taught various courses related to Korea and Asia, addressing history, gender, culture, society, and politics at CSU-Chico, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania, Seoul National University, and Soongsil University. Before joining the University of Chicago, I finished a postdoctoral fellowship at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University. I worked as an HK research professor at the Institute for the Study of Korean Modernity at Yonsei University in South Korea.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Articles

2023. “Selling Trust: Solicitation Subscriptions and the Feminization in the South Korean Insurance Industry during the Cold War Era, ” Korea Journal, March 2023.

2022. “South Korean Housewives’ Emerging Economic Authority and Contestation of Domesticity during the Cold War Era,” Gender and History, July 2022, 1-23 (print version forthcoming, July 2024).

2022. “Dreaming of Intact Home Front: Erasing Female Subjectivity in Popular Media Representations of the Vietnam War.” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 35, no. 1 (June 2022): 187–213.

2018. “Kyebaram: The Culture of Money and Investment in South Korea during the 1970s.” In Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s, edited by Ryu Youngju, 89-118. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.