The Institute for Korean Studies presents:
Monica Kim
California State University, Fullerton
Workshop and Discussion Seminar
This workshop will feature Professor Monica Kim, who will lead a discussion about her new book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton University Press). This book is a trans-Pacific history of decolonization told through the experiences of two generations of people creating and navigating the military interrogation rooms of the Korean War. Traditional histories of the Korean War have long focused on violations of the thirty-eighth parallel. But The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War presents an entirely new narrative, shifting the perspective from the boundaries of the battlefield to inside the interrogation room. Upending conventional notions of what we think of as geographies of military conflict, Dr. Kim demonstrates how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human interiority and the individual human subject. Kim looks at how, during the armistice negotiations, the United States and their allies proposed a new kind of interrogation room: one in which POWs could exercise their “free will” and choose which country they would go to after the ceasefire. The global controversy that erupted exposed how interrogation rooms had become a flashpoint for the struggles between the ambitions of empire and the demands for decolonization, as the aim of interrogation was to produce subjects who attested to a nation’s right to govern. Bringing together a vast range of sources that track two generations of people moving between three continents, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War delves into an essential yet overlooked aspect of modern warfare in the twentieth century and sheds light on how Koreans and Americans defined themselves and their futures in the early Cold War period.
Professor Kim has asked participants to read two chapters from The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War. Those interested can obtain copies by emailing Mitch Lerner at lerner.26@osu.edu.
Monica Kim is assistant professor of History at New York University, where she won the 2018 Martin Luther King, Jr. Faculty Award. She has been a member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, and has held a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a BA from Yale University and a PhD from the University of Michigan.
Free and Open to the Public
This event is co-sponsored by the History Department’s modern American history seminar. The IKS Lecture Series is supported by a U.S. Department of Education title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.
