Nam Center Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Jiun Bang completed her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in the Department of Political Science and International Relations where she examined the relationship between commodification of nationalism and bilateral inter-state tensions. Her research interests are nested within the intersection of money, politics, and power, and her second major project will be looking at the politics surrounding reparation politics- the domestic dynamics that drive the attempts by countries to settle the past through the vehicle of monetary compensation.

Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. I Jonathan Kief received his Ph.D. (2016) in modern Korean and comparative literature from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. His research explores the connected history of 1940s-1960s North and South Korean literature through the lens of a series of debates about the term "humanism." Placing these debates within a transnational literary and intellectual context, it shows how writers in the two Koreas used them in order to re-imagine both the meaning of the global Cold War conflict and the possibility of engaging with their colleagues on the other side of the thirty-eighth parallel. While at the Nam Center, he is preparing his book manuscript for publication.