2020

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS

2020_Shoan_Yin_Cheung Shoan Yin Cheung will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year of 2020-2021. Her research project is, “The Contraceptive Economy: Going into Labor with Birth Control in Precarious Japan.” The project will explore the emergence of a new socio-medical system centered on the regulation of hormones, which has become foundational to the contemporary Japanese understandings of body and gender. She argues that in a post-bubble Japanese state suffering from low fertility and flagging GDP, the newly approved pill offers women the means to control and modify themselves on a molecular level, and also synchronizes women’s material bodies with new social expectations so that they not only raise children but also work in order to make up the differences in household income.
2020_HH_Kang-2 Hyeok Hweon Kang will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year of 2020-2021. His book project is, “Crafting Knowledge: Artisan, Officer, and the Culture of Making in Chosŏn Korea, 1392–1910.” The project will investigate the Korean artisans, their supervisors, and the knowledge practices that flourished at the military workshops of Seoul, where both groups worked. While anchored in Korea, the study will expand into a global history of knowledge and artifacts, examining how military artifacts of the early modern world—from the matchlock gun in the 17th century to the steam engine in the 19th century—were made and understood in the Korean military workshops.
2020_Y_Kang Yeonsil Kang will receive a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for the academic year of 2020-2021. Her project is, “Mineral Time, Bodily Time: Asbestos, Slow Disaster, and Toxic Politics in South Korea.” She will explore the making of a slow disaster by analyzing the history of the industrial production and consumption of asbestos in South Korea between the 1940s and the 1970s, and challenge the temporal scale of a disaster as a sudden and catastrophic event or moment of shock. The project will highlight long-term, invisible, and mundane elements that ultimately lead to disasters and their close ties with development projects under changing national and regional political circumstances.

DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIPS

2020_Noa_Nahmias-2 Noa Nahmias will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year of 2020-2021. The title of her dissertation is, “Making Science Popular: Constructing Common Knowledge through Texts, Images, and Objects in China, 1920s-1960s.” By analyzing the texts, visuals and objects on science that both state and non-state actors presented to women, children, factory workers, and peasants, she will illustrate how different actors defined the terms popular science and common scientific knowledge. The study will also demonstrate that popularizing science was a project of re-defining the meaning of knowledge for Chinese citizens, and of negotiating China’s position on a global stage of knowledge production.
2020_PARK_Melany_2 Melany Sun-Min Park will receive a D. Kim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year of 2020-2021. The title of her dissertation is, “The Truss and the Dome: Architecture, Industrial Expertise, and Scientific Knowledge in Postwar Korea, 1953-1974.” This study is an architectural history of the Korean developmental state, exploring the rise of professional architects through their exchanges and collaborations with scientists, engineers, and traditional craftsmen. In contrast to previous scholarship that has interpreted modern Korean architecture as an exclusively cultural mode of production, she will demonstrate how Korea’s architectural discipline was enlisted as a state resource to catalyze and register the techno-scientific imperatives.

RESEARCH AND TRAVEL GRANTS

2020_Seohyun_Park-2 Seohyun Park will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research Grant for the academic year of 2020-2021. His research project is, “Dammed Nation: Hydrological Expertise and Global Making of Modern Korea.” Through close examinations of government reports, engineering papers, memorandums, promotional materials, and public speeches from both in the United States and Korea, he will argue that the river basin development was a process of reassembling available resources that dated to the Japanese colonial period, and that it was a mode of emanating national progress by hydrological engineers. He will visit the National Archives and the National Library in South Korea.
2020_J_Wright-2 Adrian James Wright will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research Grant for the academic year of 2020-2021. He has worked on the ethnographic study of the development and use of elderly care robots in Japan, and aims to expand the scope of his research to include other information and communication technologies. He will travel to Japan in order to gather more data regarding the development and use of care technology in Japan beyond robots and also to attend the seminars at Waseda University.
2020_Jennifer_Yip-2 Yuk Lum Jennifer Yip will receive a D. Kim Foundation Traveling/Research Grant for the academic year of 2020-2021. The title of her research project is, “Of Rice and Men: Nationalist Grain Transport Policies in Wartime China (1937-45).” The study focuses on the Nationalists’ attempts to control the arteries of the country—railways, roads and waterways—that allowed for the flow of foodstuffs from civilian fields and markets to the troops who needed them. By illustrating how the Nationalists’ struggle for food was entangled within economic networks and supply chains across national boundaries, the project will present China as an inextricable component of a truly global war. She will visit the Second Historical Archives in Nanjing.