Dr. Youngeun Koo is the 2023–24 SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Sciences. Her research focuses on the entanglements of care, humanitarianism, and development as crucial sites of social governance in the Global South. Her current book project, tentatively titled Expert, Empire, and Dictator: The Transnational Politics of Care and the Making of International Adoption in Cold War South Korea, 1961–1979, tells the story of the world’s longest-running and largest international adoption program from the little-known perspective of the first generation of...
Dr. Jeehyun Choi is a scholar of Asian American literature whose research interests lie at the intersection of Korean diasporic literatures, the global history of leftist cultural and social movements, and translation studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript about the radical anti-imperialist politics of early Korean diasporic writers in the U.S. During her time at the Korea Institute, Jeehyun will continue her work in excavating the vibrant Korean diasporic literary scene of the 1930s. She approaches translation as an opportunity to excavate transpacific dialogues obscured...
Dr. Solmi Chung's research focuses on Korean traditional fantasy, with a particular emphasis on pre-modern records documenting ghosts, spirits, and monsters. In her doctoral dissertation (2021), Chung explored the transformative encounters between imaginative entities and the introduction of novel ideologies, religions, philosophies, and cultures to trace the altered perceptions and sensory experiences of humans.
As a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, Chung plans to investigate how pre-modern...
Dr. Bo kyung Blenda Im is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in popular culture and Christianity in Korea and the Korean diaspora. During her second year in AY22-23, as the Global Korean Diasporas Postdoctoral Fellow, Blenda will continue to work on her book project, Transpacific Modernity and the Forgotten Constant: Race, Music, and Faith in Seoul. This ethnographic account of Black gospel and contemporary worship music in Korea reconceives transpacific musical modernity through a restorative chronopolitical framework. Blenda will also...
Bridget Martin is an urban geographer and political geographer researching the US-Korea alliance through the lenses of land, territory, terrain, and sovereignty. Her research traces the logics, techniques, laws, and ambiguities that made widespread American militarized land dispossessions possible during the US military occupation of southern Korea and during the Korean War, and it critically examines the more recent process of US military land returns in the context of Korea’s highly commodified real estate environment...
Yoolim Kim is a psycholinguist researching language processing, and in particular, the ways in which the language's written form affects the mental representation of the language. She specializes in Hangul and is interested in how the relationship between Hangul and Hanja influences the structure of the mental lexicon. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2019, which explored the effects of Hanja on semantic processing in Sino-Korean. Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher within the Minds and Traditions Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science...
Bridget Martin is a geographer researching the evolution of the role of land in the US-South Korea security alliance from 1945 into the present moment. She has published research articles in journals such as Political Geography and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and is currently working on her book manuscript, Land Power: Real Estate and the US Military in South Korea. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Arts in Politics from The New...
Dr. Bo kyung Blenda Im was the Global Korean Diasporas Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Korea Institute for academic years 2021-22 and 2022-23.
Bo kyung Blenda Im is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in popular culture and religion in Korea and the Korean diaspora. She deploys a combination of ethnographic, historical, and music-analytical methods to unsettle Western colonial epistemologies – particularly neo-Orientalist constructions of “Asia” – that condition the terms of inclusion and exclusion in the modern world. Her...
We are pleased to announce two new Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Korea Institute, Harvard University for AY21-22.
Global Korean Diasporas Postdoctoral Fellowship With generous support from the Jeffrey D. and Jean K. Lee Fund, the Korea Institute at Harvard University invites applications for a postdoctoral fellowship in the study of global Korean diasporas. Applicants whose research focuses on Korean ethnicity, migration, race, and/or citizenship are especially encouraged to apply.... Read more about Announcing two new Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Korea Institute, Harvard University for AY21-22.
Announcing one of our new Korea Foundation-Korea Institute Postdoctoral Fellows for AY20-21, Dr. Jennifer Hough. Jennifer Hough is a social anthropologist specializing in the politics of inclusion and exclusion in divided societies, with a particular interest in questions of social inequality, identity, and belonging. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2017 with a thesis analyzing the specific challenges that young North Korean migrants face after arrival in South Korea. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, her research addresses the question of why North...