RESEARCH INTERESTS

modern Korea and its diasporas; migration and displacement; gender, childhood, and the family; Cold War division and humanitarianism; empire and war in modern East Asia; politics of the archive

BIOGRAPHY

Hannah Y. Park is a historian of modern Korea and its diasporas whose research examines intimate archives of empire, war, migration, and Cold War division. Her work brings modern Korean history into dialogue with literary and cultural studies, gender studies, critical adoption studies, and archival methodology.

Her current book manuscript, Writing Home: Remapping Korea’s Separated Families through the Epistolary Lens, offers a transnational history of Korean family separation across the twentieth century and into the present. Tracing family networks connected across East Asia, Europe, and the Americas, the project moves beyond the DMZ to examine separation across colonial migration, interethnic marriage, socialist internationalism, transnational adoption, and diasporic repatriation. She argues that epistolary practice was not merely a private means of enduring prolonged separation, but a form of social and political action through which families re-articulated kinship, thereby contesting institutional restrictions that prevented their reunion. 

Park received her PhD in History in 2025 from the University of Chicago, where she currently serves as an Elmer Kennedy Memorial Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences. Her research has been published in Korea Journal and supported by the Korea Foundation, the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, and the Korean Collections Consortium of North America.

PUBLICATIONS

“Home and Hope for a Korean Family in Exile: Jessie’s Diary as a Source of Wartime Refuge and Resilience (1938-1946).” Korea Journal 65.4 (2025) 347-373. doi: 10.25024/kj.2025.65.4.347