Tracing the archival “discovery” of a mass killing of women in South Korea during late 1950, this talk explores the country’s social history and politics of polarization relating to women and the legacies of the Korean War. What happened? Why is this event relatively unknown compared with other massacres that preoccupy Korea’s reconciliations with its authoritarian pasts and state violence? By addressing these questions, this talk tells a larger story about the forces that have durably divided the peninsula through a gendered lens.

Speaker:
 

Diana S. Kim is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. Kim is the author of Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Rethinking Colonial Legacies across Southeast Asia: Through the Lens of the Japanese Wartime Empire (Cambridge University Press Elements Series, 2025). Her research addresses legacies of colonial rule, state-building, illicit economies and transnational history with focus on Southeast and East Asia since the late 19^th century. Kim received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and was formerly a US-Korea NextGen Scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Member at the Institute for Advanced Study.

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