Co-sponsored by Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University, Academy of Korean Studies; Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

The talk series will explore how material, cultural, ideological, and political changes that took place during Korea’s transitions from Japanese empire to U.S. military occupation to postwar Korea influenced and were influenced by people’s lives; how these changes constructed multiple identities from gender, family, and class; and how indigenous and modern elements were selected and used in constructing these new individual and collective identities in Korea during the first half of the 20th century. In doing so, the talk series will revisit the tensions, compromises, and conflicts of diverse identities in both the colonial and postcolonial contexts through the three scholars’ respective analyses of family civil law cases, medical practices, and Korea’s transwar society.

Nan Kim is Associate Professor and Director of Public History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She works on contested historical memory, transnational public history, dissent movements, peace activism, reconciliation, critical heritage studies, and notions of temporality and subjectivity. Her research engages with scholarship in memory studies, Korean Studies, contemporary history, and political anthropology, and she has recently joined two new collaborations – one in environmental humanities and another in the history of the emotions. Formally trained as a cultural anthropologist, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary history and ethnographic research with an appreciation for both theoretical analysis and the power of a compelling story.