Kevin Y. Kim
Kevin Y. Kim
Assistant Professor
Email: kykim@history.ucla.edu
Office: 5284 Bunche Hall
Phone: 310-794-9557
Biography
Kevin Y. Kim is a historian of the United States and the world, particularly Korea and Northeast Asia. His teaching and research interests include U.S. politics and diplomacy, the global Cold War and decolonization, dissent, and the history of capitalism. His current project, tentatively titled Worlds Unseen: Henry Wallace, Herbert Hoover, and the Making of Cold War America, explores the early post-World War II period as a collision of dissenting U.S. and global perspectives on the global Cold War. Supported by the American Historical Association, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for American History, and other organizations, Kim’s work has appeared in Pacific Historical Review, Diplomatic History, Modern American History and a state-of-the-field volume on Korean American studies. In addition, he has written widely on history, popular culture, and public and international affairs for The Nation, The Progressive, The Village Voice, Far Eastern Economic Review, South China Morning Post, and other publications.
Research
U.S. politics and diplomacy, the global Cold War, the “Third World” and decolonization, dissent, history of capitalism
Publications
- Roundtable Essay on Mark Atwood Lawrence, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam War Era (Princeton University Press, 2021), H-Diplo Roundtable (April 2023), https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/12631488/h-diplorjissf…
- “Recentering the United States in the World—Without Exceptionalism,” Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review (September 2020): 41–43, https://shafr.org/system/files/passport-09-2020-bessner.pdf
- “Capitalist Collisions in the Pacific.” Modern American History 3 (March 2020): 93–98.
- “Against the ‘American Century,’ Toward a Third World New Left: The Case of Helen Mears.” Diplomatic History 43 (January 2019): 130–56.
- “From Century of the Common Man to Yellow Peril: Anti-Racism, Empire, and U.S. Global Power in Henry A. Wallace’s Quest for Cold War Alternatives.” Pacific Historical Review 87 (Summer 2018): 405–38.
- “Empire, War, Globalization, and Korean America in Global and Transnational Perspectives,” in Companion to Korean American Studies, ed. Rachael Miyung Joo and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 47–76.
Awards & Grants
- Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellowship. Hoover Institution. Stanford University. 2022-23
- Faculty Fellowship. Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Harvard University. 2018-19
- Silas Palmer Research Fellowship. Hoover Institution Library and Archives. 2018
- William Appleman Williams Junior Faculty Research Grant. Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. 2015
- Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Fellowship. 2014
- J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History. John W. Kluge Center. American Historical Association. 2013-14
