Professor Monica Kim has recently been named a MacArthur Fellow. This “genius grant” fellowship provides an $800,000 stipend for the fellows to use as they see fit. The criteria that are used to select the fellows are exceptional creativity, future promise, and potential for the fellowship to lead to creative work. The director of the MacArthur Fellows describes the fellows as “architects of new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science” and “excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood.”
Professor Monica Kim is a historian of the United States and international and diplomatic history. Her research revolves around “wars of intervention” during the Cold War, more specifically the Korean War. By taking a bottom-up approach and looking at the lives and perspectives of ordinary people, Professor Kim challenges previous ideas about this war. This approach shifted factors such as race and decolonization to the forefront.
Her first book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War (Princeton University Press, 2019) has received several awards from the Association for Asian American Studies, the Association for Asian Studies, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Society for Military History.