Researcher Bio
Heonik Kwon specializes in Social Anthropology. His early research had a focus on empirical research within socialist societies, investigating the non-socialist agricultural economies of Central Asia and hunter-gatherer societies in Far Eastern Siberia, both under Soviet Russian governance. He explored the tensions between the socialist political-economic system’s conceptions of the environment and ecology and those of people indigenous to those regions. After the collapse of Soviet Russia, his research purview expanded beyond present-day socialist societies, towards a broader historical perspective focused on experiences of the Cold War in Asia. He has completed a manuscript on the changes in religious beliefs in modern Korean society, a society partitioned as a result of war, and is currently undertaking comparative regional research on changes in post-Cold War Asia. In the future he intends to return to his early research interest, the political history of the environment, with plans to use the lens of Mega-Asia to examine Asia’s perspectives on the environmental history of the Cold War and discussions of the global environment.
Key Publications
2020. After the Korean War: An Intimate History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2012. North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
2010. The Other Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press
2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (winner of the Kahin Prize)
2006. After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai, Berkeley: University of California Press (winner of the Geertz prize)
Other Experience
Visiting Professor, Seoul National University Department of Social Sciences (2019-2021)
Senior Research Fellow in Social Science, Trinity College, University of Cambridge (2011-present)
Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science Department of Anthropology (2009-2011)
Associate Professor, University of Edinburgh Department of Social Anthropology (1998-2009)
Assistant Professor, University of Manchester Department of Social Anthropology (1993-1995)
PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge (1993)