Hwasook Nam

Associate Professor Emeritus of Korean History, Jackson School of International Studies and Department of History

Professor Nam received her PhD from the University of Washington in 2003 and taught Korean and East Asian history at the University of Utah (2003-2007) and the UW (2007-2018).  Her first book, Building Ships, Building a Nation: Korea’s Democratic Unionism under Park Chung Hee (University of Washington Press, 2009), won the 2011 James B. Palais Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, and its Korean translation came out as Pae mandŭlgi nara mandŭlgi: Pak Chŏnghŭi sidae ŭi minju nojo undong kwa Taehan Chosŏn Kongsa (Seoul: Humanitas, 2014).

Professor Nam’s research focus is on Korean labor and gender history. In addition to Building Ships, Building a Nation, her recent publications include Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea (Cornell University Press, 2021), and a co-edited volume, Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea, edited by Charles Kim, Jungwon Kim, Hwasook Nam, and Serk-Bae Suh (University of Washington Press, 2019), in which she contributed a chapter titled “Reading Chung Tae-il: Making Sense of a Worker Self-Immolation in 1970s South Korea.”

Other recent publications include “Shin In-ryung” in Intellectuals in Dark Years, edited by Henry Em, Youngju Ryu, and John Duncan (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), “Progressives and Labor under Park Chung Hee: A Forgotten Alliance in 1960s South Korea” (Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 72, No. 4, November 2013: 873-92), “Narratives of Women Workers in South Korea’s ‘Democratic (Minju)’ Union Movement of the 1970s” (The Review of Korean Studies, Vol. 12 No. 4, December 2009: 14-35), and “Shipyard Women and the Politics of Gender: A Case Study of the KSEC Yard in South Korea.” in Elyssa Faison, and Ruth Barraclough, eds., Gender and Labor in Korea and Japan: Sexing Class (Routledge, 2009).