The Institute for Korean Studies presents:
"Trauma, Memory, and the Afterlives of the Korean War"
Grace M. Cho
College of Staten Island, The City University of New York
Abstract: Professor Cho will discuss her new book, Tastes Like War, which is part food memoir, part sociological investigation. It’s a hybrid text about her search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia, which she locates in the Korean War and its afterlives, as well as her family’s immigration experience to the U.S. In her mother’s final years, she learned to cook the dishes from her mother’s childhood, in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices. And over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke her mother, but also the things that kept her alive.
Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction, and Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), which received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in journals such as The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, Womens Studies Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry. She is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.