Hyeseon Woo

I am a Ph.D candidate in History at Purdue University. My main teaching field is Korean modern history. However, I have covered East Asian modern history course. I taught the East Asian modern history course during the 2018 spring semester and focused on political, economic, and cultural aspects of the three countries: China, Japan, and Korea. I have also prepared course materials for two minor teaching fields: Chinese modern history and human rights history.

Currently, I work on my dissertation regarding Korean women under the authoritarian regime in the 1960s and 1970s. My argument is that the agency of the South Korean women was a social actor and cultural practitioner rather than a resister to the authoritarian government and the system. My dissertation project focuses on South Korean women’s agency at varied degrees of social class and geographic location. Their agency was inspired and mobilized by the gendered developmental state in order to achieve the economic growth of the modern-state and form a new modern woman identity as a citizen who willingly sacrificed themselves for the state and their families.