Sung Eun Kim is 2024–25 SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Sciences at the Harvard Korea Institute. He is a historian of modern Korea whose research focuses on U.S.–ROK relations, the intersections of transnational Korean militarism and U.S. imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region, and the racial and sexual politics of colonial soldiering.

Sung Eun’s research draws from the fields of Korean studies, race and gender studies, and U.S. war and empire studies to expand the question of U.S. colonialism in modern Korean history by considering its theoretical, transnational, and interdisciplinary significance for the Asia-Pacific region. His book manuscript, Transcolonial Korea: Race, Gender, and the Making of KATUSA under U.S. Military Empire, 1945–2010, offers a critical history of the Korean Augmentation Troops to the U.S. Army, a unit of South Korean soldiers that have been conscripted into the U.S. Army in Korea from 1950 to the present. Drawing from a multilingual archive of Korean, Japanese, and English-language source materials, including personal memoirs, novels, poems, biographies, and interviews of former KATUSA soldiers—and placing this rich array of cultural accounts alongside U.S. and South Korean news reports, diplomatic correspondence, and military documents—Transcolonial Korea considers how racial, gender, and national hierarchies structured the militarized alliance between the United States and South Korea throughout the Cold War and into the present.

After his time at Harvard, Sung Eun will join the faculty at Duke University as Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in August 2025. He earned his Ph.D. in modern Korean history from UCLA, his M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies from Columbia University, and his B.A. in Asian Studies and Political Science from Vassar College.