Monica Kim is Assistant Professor at the University at Albany (SUNY) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching interests lie in U.S. and global race relations, modern East Asian and Asian American history, and international legal history.
Her current book project, Humanity Interrogated: The Wars over War in the Interrogation Room, 1942-1960, examines the relationship between two global phenomena that have critically marked the history of the twentieth century - international warfare and formal decolonization - through the prism of military interrogation rooms of the Korean War, where the legal figure of the prisoner of war became the site of protracted struggles to invent the “liberated” subject of a decolonized Asia in the early 1950s.
She has a B.A. from Yale University and Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan.
Abstract
In light of 2013 being the 60th anniversary of the armistice signing, I turn our attention to the very controversy that prolonged the ceasefire negotiations at Panmunjom for eighteen straight months: POW repatriation. Although scholars have often dismissed the POW controversy as a footnote or a propaganda ploy, I will contend that the controversy, upon closer examination, reveals the limits of international laws of war in front of decolonization. From the vantage point of the largest United Nations Command POW camp on Koje Island, I will re-examine the workings and consequences of the armistice to suggest ways for understanding the legacies of a war that has still not officially ended.
