Ju-Hyun Kim
Biography
Ju-Hyun Kim is a Ph.D. candidate whose research is about the twentieth-century postcolonial repatriation of Koreans, focusing on the case of Koreans in Sakhalin. Using both state and personal records, she explores the structures of (post-)colonial exclusion in order to address the questions of decolonization that were neglected in both Japan and South Korea during the Cold War. She is also currently a special research student at the Department of Area Studies, University of Tokyo.
Subfield
postcolonial migration, citizenship, race, colonialism, decolonization, humanitarianism, human rights, gender, international law, statelessness, Cold War, Sakhalin, Karafuto, Japanese Empire, modern Japanese history, modern Korean history, Zainichi Koreans
Research
Ju-Hyun Kim is a Ph.D. candidate whose research is about the twentieth-century postcolonial repatriation of Koreans, focusing on the case of Koreans in Sakhalin. She examines their denied citizenship as a case that testifies to the complexity of navigating the international law as a postcolonial subject who wished to return home. In most cases, their return was refused by both post-imperial Japan and postcolonial South Korea, the nation-states built under the U.S. hegemony. She examines the rationale and mechanisms of such exclusion of Koreans as well as the ineffectiveness of international law in addressing the precarious conditions of postcolonial statelessness.
Awards & Grants
- Sasakawa Graduate Fellowship, Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, 2023-24.
- Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Program, UCLA Graduate Division, 2023.
- Kawahara Graduate Fellowship, Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, 2022-23.
- Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Program, UCLA Graduate Division, 2022.
- CEAS M.A. Continuing Student Academic-year Fellowships, Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University, 2018-19.
- East Asia Graduate Summer Grants, Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University, 2018.
- Hassan and Heikkila Award, Stanford Global Studies, Stanford University, 2018.
- Student Exchange Support Program, Japan Student Services Organization, 2015.
Conference Presentations
- “Rethinking Sakhalin Korean’s repatriation around early activities of the Association of Karafuto South Korean Returnees in Japan (サハリン朝鮮人帰還問題の再考「樺太帰還在日韓国人会」の初期活動をめぐって).” The 36th Japanese Association for Migration Studies Annual Conference, Kyoto, Japan, July 5, 2026. (in Japanese)
- “Race as productivity: Karafuto as a settler colony and the Korean labor in the late 1920s.” AAS 2026 Annual Conference, Vancouver, Canada, March 14, 2026.
- “Decolonization as a process and the Cold War: The inclusion and exclusion of Koreans in Sakhalin (過程としての脱植民地化と冷戦—サハリン朝鮮人の「包摂」と「排除」をめぐって),” invited talk at Center for Korean Studies, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, February 27, 2025 (in Japanese)
- “Knowing the Other: The production of police knowledge about Koreans in interwar Karafuto.” UCLA-Yonsei-Tübingen-USC Korean Studies Graduate Student Workshop, Los Angeles, CA, January 5, 2024
- “The Limits of Humanitarianism: The Repatriations of Koreans in Sakhalin and Japan.” History Graduate Student Association (HGSA) Colloquium Series Spring 2023, Los Angeles, CA, May 25, 2023
- “Reimagning the Memories of the Battle of Okinawa.” The Japan Foundation Summer Institute in Japan, Kanagawa, Japan, July 23, 2018
