Jieon Yoo
Position title: TA: Hist 434 with Professor Monica Kim
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Email: yoo62@wisc.edu
Address:
Advisor: Monica Kim
Mailbox: 4049 Mosse Humanities Building
Biography
Jieon Yoo is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research explores the lived history of the Global Cold War in East Asia, with a particular focus on postcolonial Korea and Japan. She studies how informal economies, black markets, and smuggling networks functioned as key spaces where ordinary people navigated the overlapping forces of empire and Cold War geopolitics. Drawing on archival research, oral history, and material culture, her work approaches the Cold War from the perspective of everyday life, highlighting practices of survival and exchange often absent from state-centered narratives.
Education
M.A., History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2025
B.A., Sungkyunkwan University, Republic of Korea (Summa Cum Laude), 2021
Field
- East Asian History
MA Title
- “Shadow Networks: Smuggling and the Making of Modern Korea”
Selected Awards
- Levi Prize for Outstanding Second-Year Paper, Honorable Mention, 2025
- Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Grant, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), 2026
Courses Taught as TA
- History 104 – Introduction to Japanese History (Fall 2024)
- History 255 – East Asian Civilization (Spring 2025)
- History 319 – The Vietnam War (Fall 2025)