Featuring Monica Kim
Associate Professor & William Appleman Williams Chair in U.S. International and Diplomatic History
University of Wisconsin Madison

What happens when we begin the story of warfare from inside the interrogation room? In this talk, I will speak about the how I came to the interrogation room as a core site from which to begin my work on the Korean War. Ultimately, the challenges of conceptualizing the archive of interrogation—both in terms of paper and bodies—opened up a deeper inquiry into the utility of warfare for the U.S. empire in an era of formal decolonization. My book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History, begins both in post-1945 U.S-occupied Korea and also the Japanese American internment camps of WWII, and I will discuss how, during my research, examining the interrogator and the interrogatee entirely burst the usual temporal bounds of the Korean War via the longer histories of race, empire, and colonialism across the Pacific.

Presented by the IAS Collaborative Gender and Violence: Korea and Beyond.
 

Monica Kim is Associate Professor and the William Appleman Williams Chair in U.S. International and Diplomatic History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History, was published inn 2019 by Princeton University Press—and her talk today will build off of the research she conducted for this book. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War received top prizes from four different scholarly associations: the Association for Asian Studies, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Society for Military History, and the Association for Asian American Studies. Beyond the classroom, she has worked with feminist and critical scholars in the U.S. and South Korea around political and pedagogical interventions aimed at ending the ongoing Korean War, and she was involved with community and campus organizing around Sanctuary during her tenure at New York University before arriving at UW-Madison. She has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and is currently a member of the editorial collective at The Radical History Review. Most recently, she co-edited a special issue of Radical History Review, titled "Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination," which came out in 2020.