Postdoctoral Fellowship

Notice

Please note that GWIKS is not offering a Postdoctoral Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic year.  We hope to offer a postdoctoral fellowship again in future years and we encourage interested applicants to stay connected with GWIKS for updates on future opportunities.

While GWIKS is not offering its own postdoctoral fellowship in 2024-2025 we are happy to consider affiliation requests from Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows for the 2024-2025 academic year. Please note that all application materials must be submitted directly to the Korea Foundation and KF (not GW) is responsible for any postdoctoral fellow payments or stipends. To be considered for a KF postdoctoral fellow affiliation please submit a copy of your KF application materials to gwiks@gwu.edu prior to the end of KF‘s application window (at least 2 weeks before the close of the KF application). 

Please contact gwiks@gwu.edu with any questions.  

GWIKS logo with text overlay: The George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship in Korean Studies (Social Sciences) Academic Year 2020-21

2023-2024 Postdoctoral Fellow

Sung Eun Kim

sungeun.kim@gwu.edu

Sung Eun Kim is Postdoctoral Fellow at the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS). He is an interdisciplinary historian of modern Korea whose research focuses on U.S.–ROK relations, the intersections of transnational Korean militarism and U.S. imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region, and the racial and sexual politics of colonial soldiering. His forthcoming article in the Journal of Asian Studies (August 2024) analyzes the use of Korean augmentees under joint US–French command during the Korean War and highlights how both countries borrowed strategies from their use of indigenous soldiers in their respective imperialist past. This article argues that the multilateral militarized alliances forged under the U.S. cooptation of the United Nations banner in the Korean theater of war enable us to see how transcolonial racial politics in the decolonizing Pacific straddled European and American imperialism. 

Sung Eun’s research draws from the fields of Korean studies, race and gender studies, and U.S. war and empire studies to expand the question of U.S. colonialism in modern Korean history by considering its theoretical, transnational, and interdisciplinary significance for the Asia-Pacific region. His book manuscript, Transcolonial Korea: Race, Gender, and the Making of KATUSA under U.S. Military Empire, 1945–2010, offers a critical history of the Korean Augmentation Troops to the U.S. Army, a unit of South Korean soldiers that have been conscripted into the U.S. Army in Korea from 1950 to the present. Drawing from a multilingual archive of Korean, Japanese, and English-language source materials, including personal memoirs, novels, poems, biographies, and interviews of former KATUSA soldiers—and placing this rich array of cultural accounts alongside U.S. and South Korean news reports, diplomatic correspondence, and military documents—Transcolonial Korea considers how racial, gender, and national hierarchies structured the militarized alliance between the United States and South Korea throughout the Cold War and into the present.  

Sung Eun earned his Ph.D. in modern Korean history from UCLA, his M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies from Columbia University, and his B.A. in Asian Studies and Political Science from Vassar College.