Nan Kim

Nan KIM is Associate Professor of History and Affiliated Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she serves as Co-Director of Public History. Her interdisciplinary research concerns public memory, peace and environmental activism, and contemporary political-economic controversies over historical trauma and legacies of war.

As an interdisciplinary scholar and a former journalist, she has been committed to writing that is accessible to broad audiences about timely issues of public concern. Among her recent publications is a chapter on memory activism amid ideological culture wars, which appeared in the Routledge Handbook of Trauma in East Asia (2023). She is the author of Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide (Lexington Books, 2017), which narrates a contemporary history of Korea’s ongoing national division by focusing on the families who have been separated, since the mid-20th century, by the divide between North and South. The book was awarded the Scott Bills Memorial Prize by the Peace History Society in 2019.

As Public History co-director at UW-Milwaukee, she has consulted on projects for museums, historical societies, and communities in Milwaukee and the region. She is also on the core faculty of the university’s Museum Studies graduate program and helped to establish a graduate certificate on Digital Cultures. Formally trained as a cultural and political anthropologist, Nan Kim currently serves on the executive board of the Society for East Asian Anthropology. She also serves on the editorial board for Critical Asian Studies, formerly the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.

Bio March 2024