Abstract: The Institute for Korean Studies is pleased to host Dr. Monica Kim, on Wednesday, April 17, 2013, 12:30 p.m. at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. Dr. Kim’s talk, titled “Making a Prisoner for War: Examining the Korean War Armistice from Behind and Beyond the Barbed-wire Fence,”will focus on the controversy that prolonged the Korean War ceasefire negotiations at Panmunjom for eighteen straight months: POW repatriation. Although scholars have often dismissed the POW controversy as a footnote or a propaganda ploy, this talk will contend that the controversy, upon closer examination, reveals the limits of international laws of war in front of decolonization. From the vantage point of the largest United Nations Command POW camp on Koje Island, this talk will re-examine the workings and consequences of the armistice to suggest ways for understanding the legacies of a war that has still not officially ended.
To register for this event, RSVP on Eventbrite by Monday, April 15, 2013. If you have any questions or concerns, please email Ann Powers at powers.108@osu.edu.
Biography: Monica Kim is Assistant Professor at the University at Albany (SUNY) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching interests lie in U.S. and global race relations, modern East Asian and Asian American history, and international legal history. Her current book project, Humanity Interrogated: The Wars over War in the Interrogation Room, 1942-1960, examines the relationship between two global phenomena that have critically marked the history of the twentieth century - international warfare and formal decolonization - through the prism of military interrogation rooms of the Korean War, where the legal figure of the prisoner of war became the site of protracted struggles to invent the “liberated” subject of a decolonized Asia in the early 1950s. This talk is co-sponsored by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. For more information, contact Mitch Lerner at lerner.26@osu.edu.
