
Co-Presented by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and East Asian Studies Center
Dr. Na Sil Heo is an Assistant Professor of East Asian History. Her research interests include studies of childhood, the cultural Cold War, race, and gender and sexuality. She is currently completing a book manuscript that examines how childhood was a crucial site of postwar reconstruction and transnational anticommunism in 1950s-1960s South Korea. Reading sources ranging from home floor plans and children’s literature to infant formula advertisements, her work reveals how Cold War liberalism manifested in various realms of childhood in postwar Korea. Her research has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies and Gender & History. Heo’s second book project locates the history of family planning in South Korea within transnational circulations of medical knowledge, contraceptives, and population control advocates.