Speaker Bios

Chris Suh

Chris Suh is an Associate Professor of History and an affiliated faculty member in the East Asian Studies program at Emory University. He has won multiple awards for his research, teaching, and advocacy for Asian American students on campus. His first book, The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion (Oxford University Press, 2023), received an Honorable Mention for the Stuart L. Bernath Prize for the best first book from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SAHFR).

Chan Yong Bu

Chan Yong Bu is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He is currently writing a book on a media history of the steel factory, focusing on how modern steel production technology has shaped the notion of connectedness in South Korea. He has also published articles and book chapters on a variety of topics, including the impact of the IMF financial crisis on Korean cinema, the travelogues of late Chosŏn envoys and American travelers, Korean literature on salaried women, and feminist cartography of borderlands. He also co-curated a film exhibition at the Harvard Film Archive in 2023 that critically reflected on the history of the ROK-US alliance through selected Korean War and postwar films.

Joseph Seeley

Joseph Seeley is an Assistant Professor and specialist in the history of Korea, the Japanese Empire, and East Asian environmental history.

His book Border of Water and Ice (forthcoming October 2024) examines the Yalu River boundary between northern Korea and China during a period of Japanese expansion in the region. Drawing on previously unexamined sources in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, he argues that the seasonally freezing, thawing, and flooding river was a critical actor in imperial border creation and contestation. As part of his multilingual research on Korean history, Seeley has also published on topics such as animal disease control in colonial Korea, US-Korean diplomatic history, Korean tiger-human relations, and the history of Japanese colonial zoos in Seoul and Taipei.

Prior to joining the History faculty at UVA Seeley completed his doctoral studies at Stanford University, where his research was supported by the Korea Foundation and the Freeman Spogli Institute. Before Stanford he earned a bachelor’s degree in History with a minor in Korean from Brigham Young University.

Jaeeun Kim

Jaeeun Kim is Korea Foundation Endowed Associate Professor of Sociology and Professor of Law (by Courtesy) at the University of Michigan. She is a political sociologist and law and society scholar, studying race/ethnicity/nationalism and migration/citizenship from a comparative-historical and transnational perspective. Kim is the author of an award-winning book, Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea (Stanford University Press 2016). Her article “Migration-Facilitating Capital: A Bourdieusian Theory of International Migration” (Sociological Theory 2018) won the Theory Prize from the American Sociological Association. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2016–2017) and a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2020–2021), where she holds a non-resident permanent fellow position, beginning in Fall 2024.

Kelly M. Rich

Kelly M. Rich is Assistant Professor of English at Wellesley College. She is the author of States of Repair: The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel (Oxford University Press, 2023), and is currently at work on her second book project, Children of Conflict: Cultural Formations of Transnational Adoption. With Nicole M. Rizzuto and Susan Zieger, she co-edited the MLA-prize winning collection The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern University Press, 2022). Her research has appeared in Representations, ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and has been supported by AAUW, Wellesley College, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Bridget Martin

Bridget Martin is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Korean Studies at the University of Mississippi. Bridget 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.

Hoi-eun Kim

Hoi-eun Kim is a social and cultural historian of modern Europe and modern East Asia, who has an ongoing interest in the interactions between Germany, Japan, and Korea in the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, he focuses on medical doctors as transnational agents of knowledge formation and empire-building. Currently, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Awards for Faculty), he is writing a book on Japanese doctors in colonial Korea (1910-1945) as researchers, teachers, and private practitioners.