Biography of Advisory Council Members

Prof. George Lopez

George A. Lopez is the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where he was a founding faculty member and award winning teacher. He is a leading expert on economic sanctions, peacebuilding, and various peace-related issues. During 33 years of affiliation with the Kroc Institute, Lopez has engaged in a diverse set of policy and public roles. He served as interim executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1997 and chaired its Board of Directors (1998-2003) presiding over changing the hands of the Doomsday Clock in 2002. As a senior research associate at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City in 2001-02 he assisted with the Council’s post-9/11 public programming throughout the U.S. He held a Senior Jennings Randolph Fellowship at USIP from 2009-10 and served as a member of the United Nations Panel of Experts for monitoring and implementing UN Sanctions on North Korea from 2010-11. From 2013-15, he was the Vice President of the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C. In 2018 he was named a Fulbright Senior Specialist and in 2019 selected as a Non-Residential Fellow of the Quincy Institute a bi-partisan, Washington, DC based think-tank committed to ending endless war.

Since 1992, Lopez has advised the United Nations, various international agencies, and governments on economic sanctions issues, ranging from assessing their humanitarian impact to the design of targeted financial sanctions. He has written more than 50 articles and book chapters and authored or edited six books (often with Kroc Institute faculty member David Cortright) on sanctions. Lopez and Cortright’s research detailing the unlikely presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was published before the 2003 Iraq War as “Disarming Iraq” in Arms Control Today and after the war as “Containing Iraq: the Sanctions Worked” in Foreign Affairs. He writes op-eds and appears on public media often about sanctions issues.

Prof. Heon-ik KWON

HEON-IK KWON
Trinity College
Cambridge CB2 1TQ
Tel: +44-1223-338581
Email: hik21@cam.ac.uk

ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS

2011–present Senior Research Fellow in Social Science, Trinity College, University of Cambridge; Distinguished Research Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
2009–2011 Professor of Social Anthropology, London School of Economics
1998–2009 Lecturer and Reader in Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh
1996–1998 Evans Fellow, University of Cambridge
1993–1995 Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Manchester

EDUCATION

1993 Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
1989 MPhil in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
1985 BA in Political Science, University of Michigan
1981–1982 Philosophy, Seoul National University

HONOURS AND AWARDS

Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of Social Sciences, Seoul National University (2018)
Humanitas Prize, Humanities Center, University of Pittsburgh (2017).
Kyung-Am Academic Prize, Pusan (2016).
Visiting Professor, College of Social Sciences Seoul National University (2013–2016).
Visiting Professor in EHESS, Paris, and in the Free University of Berlin (2012).
Laboratory for the Globalization of Korean Studies Award, Academy of Korean Studies (2010–2015, 2016–2021).
Inaugural George McT. Kahin Prize, Association for Asian Studies (2009).
British Academy Research Development Award (2008).
Clifford Geertz Prize, American Anthropological Association (2007).
Strategic Research Award, University of Edinburgh (2007).
Economic and Social Research Council Research Fellowship (2003–2006).
British Academy Southeast Asian Studies Research Fellowship (2001).
Pilot Research Award, University of Edinburgh (2000).
Chadwick Scholarship, University of Cambridge (1990).

TEACHING AND ADMINISTRATION

Teaching Experience

Honours teaching: Advanced Theories in Anthropology; History of Anthropology 1905–1955; History & Anthropology; War & Culture; Kinship: Structure & Process; Religion in Everyday Life; Ecology & Society; The Idea of the West in Anthropology; Introduction to Anthropology
Postgraduate teaching: Pre-fieldwork Seminar; Writing-up Seminar; Interdisciplinary Research Methods; Theory & Ethnography; History of War & History of Anthropology; Anthropology & Global History ; Nature & Society

Professional Service (selection)

2017–present Academic Committee, European Research Foundation
2014–present Academic Committee, Fyssen Foundation, France
2014–present International Advisorary Board, Asia Centre, University of Sussex
2013 –present Fellowship selection committee, Trinity College
2013–present Advisor to the Spanish Research Council’s Material Culture of the Spanish Civil War programme.
2012–present Management Committee, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge
2011–present Management Committee, William Wyse Foundation, University of Cambridge
2010–present Management Committee, Cold War History, London School of Economics
Others Editorial committee at 24 peer-reviewed international journals

Peer Review - Journals

Anthropology: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, History and Anthropology, L’Homme, Focaal, Current Anthropology, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Ethnos, Australian Journal of Anthropology, PoLAR, HAU (online).
Asian Studies: Asia-Pacific Journal (online), Critical Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, South East Asia Research, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Journal of East Asian Studies, Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies, Review of Korean Studies.
History: H-Diplo (online), Diplomatic History, Nations and Nationalism, Journal of Global History, Past & Present, Journal of Cold War Studies, Cold War History, History of Religions,.
Others: Memory Studies, Religion in Society, Journal of American Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of Classical Sociology, Sociological Inquiry, American Journal of Sociology, E-International Relations (online).

Peer Review - Books

Cambridge University Press, Columbia University Press, University of California Press, Routledge, Rowman & Littlefield, Indiana University Press, Duke University Press, Harvard University Press

Public Engagement (selection)

Organizer of annual History Meets Anthropology public lectures, University of Cambridge, jointly with the Cambridge University Social Anthropology Society and the Cambridge Historical Society (2011–present).
External advisor to the Ministry of Unification, South Korea, and the UK House of Lords Committee on DPRK (2014).
Public lectures on the Vietnam War, Korean War, Cold War, and cultures of commemoration in: Seoul (2008, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014), Honolulu (2013), Rome (2013), Tokyo (2010, 2012), Berlin (2012, 2013), Cambridge & London (2012), New York (2010).
Founded the annual Cambridge/LSE Student Debates in Anthropology (2012–present)
15 media interviews on legacies of the Cold War in East Asia and on North Korea (2012–2013)
Talks at BBC, BBC World Service and Australian National Radio on legacies of the Vietnam War (2008–2010)
External advisor to the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, South Korea (2008–2010, for the excavation of the Korean War civilian mass graves)
External advisor to the Forensic Department, Headquarters of the Army of the Republic of Korea (2005–2006, for the recovery of the remains of unaccounted-for soldiers of the Korean War including those of Chinese and North Korean origins)
External advisor to the Museum of War, Danang, Vietnam (2005)

RESEARCH

General Research Interests

Religion and politics; kinship in political theory and history; cultures of war commemoration; comparative Cold War social and cultural history; Cold War environmental history; anthropology of global history.
Social and political thought in interwar Europe; mid-century American cultural theories; social and cultural theoretical approach to international politics; history of ecological ideas in social research.
East Asia (Vietnam and the Koreas); Circumpolar North (Russian Far East).

Current Research

Cambridge History of the Korean War, 3-volume publication project, general editor.
The End of the Korean War, single-authored book project on the ethnography of Korea’s peace process, commissioned by Rowman & Littlefield.
The World in 1919, research networking and publication project on the centenary of 1914-1918 and the origin of decolonization including Korea’s March First Movement, commissioned by Cambridge University Press.
The Culture of Peace: UNESCO and Anthropology, co-authored book project (with Kyung-Koo Han) on the early history of the UNESCO’s Department of Social Science.
The Lines of the Cold War, single-authored book project on the plurality of Cold War experience in Asia, commissioned by Routledge Masters in Asian Studies.
American Power in Korean Religion, co-authored book project on a religious history of the Cold War focusing on traces of American power in Korean religions, commissioned by Fordham University Press.
The Gravekeeper’s Dilemmas, single-authored book project on changing burial customs and policies in contemporary Vietnam amid market economic reform, fieldwork completed.

Previous Research

Project director of a major international, interdisciplinary collaborative research initiative (Beyond the Korean War) involving eight international fellows, twenty international collaborators and several international symposiums on the integration of social and international histories of the Korean War (October 2010–March 2016).
Legacies of Myer Fortes, conference and publication project in collaboration with Marilyn Strathern and Susan Drucker-Brown, Cambridge (2015).
British Academy research project ‘New ancestral shrines after the cold war’ (January 2009–June 2010, Researched the comparative political history of kinship in Vietnam and Korea).
North Korea: the theatre state of the Cold War (2008, book project on North Korea’s public monuments and mass spectacles in collaboration with Professor Byung-Ho Chung of Hanyang University).
Academy of Korean Studies-supported research on family rituals in South Korea due to relatives missing from the war or those who are believed to have moved to North Korea during the war (September 2007–August 2008).
Edinburgh University-supported short research visit to the Evros region of northeastern Greece (July–August 2007). Visited two neighbouring villages that were in conflict during the civil war; interviewed the local survivors and examined the villages’ war memorials; and investigated the ruined houses in the villages and in the town of Souflis that have been abandoned since the war.
ESRC research fellowship project on comparative Cold War cultural history with an emphasis on Vietnam and Korea (September 2003–December 2006). Collected data on the local history of the Korean War; participated in the excavation of mass graves for civilians massacred during the Korean War; and investigated the symbolism of American power in Korean shamanism and evangelical Christianity focused on the iconicity of General Douglas MacArthur. Researched family-based reburial activities in Vietnam for casualties of the Vietnam War and the revival of ancestral rites. Investigated the U.S. MIA missions to Indochina (and more recently to North Korea) and studied the United States Peace Corps’ activity in 1970s East Asia based on archive material available at the National Archives, J. F. Kennedy Library and elsewhere, as well as interviews with former volunteers, including those who later became academic or policy specialists.
British Academy and Cambridge University-supported fieldwork on local history and social memory of war in central Vietnam (2001–2002, 1996–1997). Studied the history of the My Lai massacre and other related war crime incidents, and investigated the ritual memory of mass war deaths and human displacement in war.
Chadwick Foundation-supported fieldwork in far eastern Siberia (Sakhalin Island) among an indigenous nomadic population (1990–1991). Researched gender and ecology; the impact of collectivization and the development of the oil industry on indigenous economy and ecological relations; conflicts between the idea of primitive communism and the reality of institutional communism in early Soviet nationality policies; the history of political terror and its representation in indigenous myths and songs; and the history of animism and shamanism in indigenous Siberia.
Document-based study of migratory farm labourers in Soviet Central Asia (1988–1989). Studied the importance of informal economy in Soviet agricultural production.

Future Research

Anthropology and Global Ecology, teaching and writing project on the history of ecological ideas in modern anthropological research.

RECENT DISSEMINATION OF RESEARCH

Activities in 2018

Association for Asian Studies annual conference in Washington DC, special panel on Asia in the Cold War (March 2018).
‘How does North Korea remember the Korean War?’, Lecture in the Einstein Forum, Potsdam (May 2018).
‘The postcolonial Cold War’, keynote at the ‘Asia in the Cold War’ conference, Stockholm University (May 2018).
‘UNESCO as a universal museum’, paper given at the Royal Anthropological Institute conference in London (June 2018).
‘The gravekeeper’s last wishes’, paper delivered at a workshop in the University of Louvain-la-Neuve (June 2018).
‘UNESCO’s anthropologists’, paper delivered at the Korean Anthropological Association annual conference in Seoul (June 2018).
‘Les voisins invisibles’, public lecture at the Musée du Quai Branly (June 2018).
‘Community at peace’, seminar at the Jeju Peace Institute, Jeju (July 2018).
‘The lines of the Cold War’, keynote lecture at the Singapore National University conference on Cold War History in Asia (July 2018).
‘The world in 1919’, keynote at a conference in Seoul on Korea’s March First Movement in 1919 (August 2018).
‘From civil war to social peace’, paper delivered at the UNESCO’s Third International Conference on Global Citizenship Education, Seoul (September 2018). · ‘The ideal of world peace in modern Korean Studies, 1919-2019’, the Academy of Korean Studies’ World Congress of Korean Studies, South Korea (September 2018).
‘On universal hospitality’, paper given at the World Social Science Forum 2018, Fukuoka (September 2018).
‘Korea’s war and peace: an intimate history’, Underwood College Shinhan lecture, Yonsei University, Seoul (November 2018).

2017

‘The spectral in contemporary heritage studies’, MacDonald Institute for Heritage Studies, University of Cambridge (January 2017).
‘On the concept of amicitia’, Korea University Jeju peace forum (January 2017).
Two lectures at the Humanities Center, University of Pittsburgh (February 2017).
‘Peace-making in Jeju, South Korea’, lecture at the Johns Hopkins University (March 2017).
‘New understandings of Asia’s Cold War’ panel at the Association for Asian Studies conference, Toronto (March 2017).
‘Displacement in death’, Mellon lecture at the Brown University (March 2017).
‘Asia in 1919’, lecture at the Dublin University (April 2017).
Hosted a public lecture by Alastair Morgan, UK ambassador to DPRK, Trinity College (May 2017).
‘Towards a community of Asia’, plenary roundtable at the Association for Asian Studies in Asia conference, Korea University (June 2017).

2016

Seminar at the Department of Anthropology, University of Oslo (January 2016).
Invited to give a talk at the National Museum of Folklore, Seoul (April 2016).
Wiles Lectures, Queens University of Belfast, invited discussant (May 2016).
‘Unlearning the Cold War’ conference at the National University of Singapore (May 2016).
Keynote at the Association for Asian Studies conference, Kyoto (June 2016).
‘The Cold War and the community of Asia’, Yeungnam University One Asia lecture series (October 2017).
‘Peace-making in Jeju’, Jeju Peace Museum (October 2016).
‘The violence of the Cold War’, Yonsei Jeju Forum (October 2016).
‘Reconceptualizing Asia’s Cold War’, lecture at the Stockholm University Asia Center (November 2016).
‘Vietnam’s two wars’, lecture at the Department of International Politics, Seoul National University (November 2017).
‘Knowing the Cold War as a global citizen’, lecture at the UNESCO global citizenship lectures, College of Liberal Studies, Seoul National University (November 2016).
‘The postwar in Asia’ conference, Westminster College, Cambridge (December 2016).

2015

University lecture, Free University of Berlin (January 2015).
Conference on religious pluralism, Göttingen University (January 2015).
Inaugural symposium of the Association of Cold War Studies in East Asia, Asia Center, Seoul (February 2015, founding member).
Inaugural conference of the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies, Humboldt University (March 2015, founding member).
University lecture, New York University (March 2015).
‘Civil war and narrative’ conference, SOAS (May 2015).
Master-classes, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University (June 2015).
‘The legacies of Meyer Fortes’ conference, Cambridge (July 2015, co-organizer).
Invited to deliver a keynote address at the European Association of Korean Studies conference, Bochum (July 2015).
International symposium on the border studies of Korea, Shinhan University (October 2015).
Invited to give a lecture at the Department of Anthropology, University College of London (October 2015).
Panel on Cold War history at the annual conference of historians, Seoul National University (October 2015).
Invited to deliver a keynote speech at the conference on popular religions in South and Southeast Asia, SOAS (December 2015).

2014

‘The future of Asian Studies’ symposium, University of Wisconsin at Madison (October 2014).
Invited lectures—Segyo Institute, Seoul; Department of International Politics, Seoul National University; Seoul Biennale, Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art; Department of Anthropology, Seoul National University; Department of Folklore, Andong University; East Asia Institute, Seoul; Dong-guk University; Korea Cold War studies association ; Korea University (September 2014).
‘The World Congress of North Korean Studies’, Seoul (September 2014). · ‘Global Korean Studies and Korean Anthropology’, lecture at the Seoul National University (September 2014).
Two invited university lectures, University of Hawaii (February 2014).
Lecture at the University of Tübingen (January 2014).
Seminars and lectures in the LSE, Sussex, Kent, Goldsmiths and elsewhere (January-February 2014).

2013

Keynote at the Joint East Asian Studies Conference, Nottingham (September 2013).
Berlin colloquium on ‘War Monuments and Memorials Beyond Memory and Representation’, European Academy in Berlin (September 2013).
Associations for Korean Studies in Europe biannual conference, Vienna (July 2013).
‘Sixty Years after the End of the Korean War’ conference, LSE IDEAS (June 2013).
‘Beyond the Korean War’ second international conference, University of Chicago (June 2013, co-organizer).
Conference on Japan and the Korean War, Hiroshima University (April 2013, co-organizer).
The social studies of the Korean War meeting, Yonsei University, South Korea (March 2013).
‘Mao’s eldest son’, lecture presented at the EHESS, Stanford University, and Oxford University (November 2012-January 2013).

2012

Master class, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University (December 2012).
‘The Cold War and the Asia-Pacific’, symposium on ‘Asia and the Pacific’, Australian National University, combined with another lecture at the university’s Center for Korean Studies (December 2012).
‘The Korean War and Sino-North Korean international friendship’, lecture at the EHESS, Paris (November 2012).
Invited to a plenary session at the American Anthropological Association annual conference, San Francisco (November 2012)
‘Historical Memories in Korea and East Asia’ conference in the Free University of Berlin, combined with a Visiting Professorship (October 2012).
‘Ethnography and Public Anthropology’ conference in the Horniman Museum, London (October 2012).
Invited to the London School of Economics postgraduate students’ Cold War studies forum, LSE IDEAS and LSE Department of International History (September 2012).
‘New Horizons of the Korean War Studies’, first conference of the Academy of Korean Studies International Laboratory project Beyond the Korean War, Yonsei University, Seoul, co-organizer (June 2012).
‘The social and political life of the soul’, lecture given at the colloque ‘Les forms élémentaires de la vie religieuse de Durkheim 1912-2012’, Collège de France, Paris (June 2012).
‘Rethinking the global Non-Aligned Movement’, Belgrade, co-sponsor and member of the organizing committee (May 2012)
‘Anthropology of Religion in the Post-Cold War World’ conference, European Academy in Berlin, co-organiser (April 2012).
Conference in honour of Dame Caroline Humphrey, King’s College, Cambridge (April 2012).
Symposium on the history of Afro-Asian solidarity in Montreal (March 2012).
‘North Korea’s partisan family state’, paper given at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Toronto (March 2012).
‘Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life’, paper presented at the faculty seminar, Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge (February 2012).

Activities in 2011

Keynote lecture at the European Council Marie Curie symposium ‘Sustainable Peace-Building in Europe’, Bilbao, Spain (December 2011).
‘Korea in the 1950s’ conference at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, co-sponsor and paper-giver (December 2011).
Invited to the Cambridge University postgraduate students’ symposium on new Cold War studies (December 2011).
‘On remembrance’, Fellows’ Research Talk, Trinity College, Cambridge (November 2011).
‘North Korea’s political dreams: Pyongyang as a global city’, lecture given at the LSE Geography and Environment seminar series (November 2011).
The LSE Korea Society conference, co-sponsor (November 2011).
American Anthropological Association conference in Montreal, paper-giver and discussant (November 2011).
‘North Korea’s commemoration of the Korean War’, lecture given at the ‘Historical Memories in Korea’ conference, Center for Korean Studies, Leiden (October 2011).
‘The limits of the French theory’, faculty seminar at the Department of Anthropology, LSE (October 2011).
‘From Pierre Bourdieu back to Myer Fortes’, paper presented at the Cambridge University Social Anthropological Society (October 2011).
‘Cold War in a Vietnamese village’, paper presented at the Congrès Réseau Asie, Paris (September 2011).
‘Rethinking the traumas of war’, conference on religion and science, University of Barcelona, Barcelona (July 2011).
‘The postcolonial Cold War’, the European Academy conference ‘Cold War: History, Memory and Representation’, Berlin (July 2011).
Invited to a conference on the legacy of Walter Benjamin, University of St Andrews (June 2011).
Keynote lecture at the European Council symposium on modern war memories in Europe and beyond, Madrid (June 2011).
Invited to the Association of Korean Studies in Europe conference in Moscow to give a talk on the contemporary meanings of the Korean War (June 2011).
Invited to the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations conference in Washington DC (June 2011).
‘Centring the periphery and its dangers: lessons from North Korea’, workshop on cultural ideas of centre and periphery in honour of Stephan Feuchtwang, LSE (June 2011).
‘Rethinking the traumas of war’, Institute of Global Studies, University of Bristol (June 2011).
Honorary lecture on communal Korean war memories at the School of International Culture Studies, Hanyang University, Ansan, South Korea (June 2011).
‘Souls of war dead in Vietnam’, invited lecture at the Institute of Religious Studies, Sogang University, Seoul (June 2011).
‘Is blood thicker than ideology?: a moral history of the Korean War’, seminar at the Faculty of East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge (May 2011).
‘The cults of fallen soldiers in Vietnam, North Korea and China’, the Max Planck Institute conference on religion and communism, Goettingen, Germany (May 2011).
Keynote at the conference on cultures of commemoration, Johns Hopkins University (April 2011).
‘The transpacific Cold War’, the Wenner-Gren conference on the ethnographies of empire, New York (April 2011).
‘Max Weber to North Korea’, distinguished lecture at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto (March 2011).
‘Rethinking the new war idea’, Center of Globalization and Development, University of Gothenburg, Sweden (April 2011).
Interview with the BBC World Service on war and religion in Vietnam.
‘The Cold War origin of cultural pluralism’, lecture given at the School of Social Science, University of Manchester (February 2011).
‘Guilty by association’, faculty seminar at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge (February 2011).
‘Experiencing the Cold War’, lecture given at the IDEAS, LSE (January 2011).

2010

‘The gender of the environment’, distinguished lecture delivered at the Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo (December 2010).
‘Perspectivism in anthropology’, lecture at Tokyo University (December 2010).
‘The Korean War and the political life of kinship’, paper presented at the British Association of Korean Studies conference, Asia House, London (November 2010).
‘North Korea’s modern theatre state’, paper presented at the Asian Dynamics conference, Copenhagen (November 2010).
‘New revolutionary movements in post-revolutionary Vietnam’, paper presented at the Asian Dynamics conference, Copenhagen (November 2010).
‘War, trauma and historical memory in Korea’, lecture given at the New York Korea Society conference ‘The Korean War Today’ (September 2010).
‘Rethinking Cold War culture’, lecture delivered at the Weatherhead East Asia Institute, Columbia University (September 2010).
‘Max Weber to North Korea’, paper presented at the City University of Hong Kong conference ‘Asian Authoritarianism’ (June 2010).
‘Rethinking the postcolonial theory’, lecture at the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago (April 2010).
Keynote lecture ‘Two colour-lines in modern Asia-Pacific’, conference on transpacific studies at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (April 2010).
‘The postcolonial Cold War’, lecture at the University of Chicago (April 2010).

2009

‘The theatre state of North Korea’, seminar at the Department of Anthropology, SOAS (December 2009).
‘Invisible neighbours in Vietnamese villages’, paper on Vietnamese ghost-related rituals presented at the Cambridge University Centre for Inner-Asian Studies conference on religion and cognition (December 2009).
‘What happened to North Korea’s Korean War fallen?’, lecture given at the Korea Foundation Korean Studies Forum, Yonsei University, Korea (November 2009). Also a lecture on North Korea at the University of North Korean Studies, Seoul.
‘Max Gluckman and the Korean War’, distinguished lecture at Chonbuk University, Korea (October 2009).
‘Esprit in the work of Durkheim, Mauss and Hertz’, paper presented at the conference ‘Mauss Vivant’ in Cerisy-la-Salle, France (June 2009).
Invited to the presidential panel on historical approaches to contemporary popular religions in East Asia, the American Anthropological Association’s Society for the Anthropology of East Asia conference in Taipei (June 2009).
Keynote ‘The decomposition of the Cold War’ at the conference on ‘War in the Twentieth Century: History and Culture’ held jointly by Yonsei University and the University of Washington at St Louis (June 2009).
‘Early Cold War and Contemporary Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia’, paper given at a conference organized by the Yeungnam University and Northeast Asia History Foundation, Korea (May 2009).
‘North Korea: the theatre state of the cold war’, paper presented at the Faculty of East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies seminar, Cambridge University (March 2009).
‘The moral economy of haunted houses’, paper on popular religion in 17th century Europe presented at the American Anthropological Association’s Society for the Anthropology of Religion meeting, Asilomar, California (March 2009).
‘Why aren’t there any war cemeteries in North Korea?’, distinguished lecture at the Center for Asian Studies, University of Michigan (March 2009).
Paper on war and religion in Vietnam, the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Psychological Anthropology annual meeting, Asilomar, California (March 2009).
‘Parallax visions in Dokdo-Takeshima disputes’, talk given at the Daiwa Foundation, London (March 2009).
‘The trauma of the dead’, paper presented at the ‘Touching War’ conference, Lancaster (January 2009).

2008

‘The excavation of the Korean War mass graves’, public lecture at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Human Rights Commission, Korea (December 2008).
‘The global cold war and contemporary anthropological research’, paper given at the 50th anniversary conference of the Korean Association of Cultural Anthropologists, Seoul (November 2008).
‘The ethics of memory’, paper given at the conference ‘The Anthropology of Ethics’, University of Toronto (October 2008).
‘Remembering the Cold War’, distinguished lecture given at the Center for the United States and the Cold War, New York University (September 2008).
‘The decomposition of the cold war and the new role of Asia in the 1970s’, lecture given at the Cold War History Center, University of Bologna (September 2008).
‘Hồn ma từ cuộc chiến’, interview at the BBC World Service on popular war memories in Vietnam (August 2008).
‘The Vietnam ghosts’, talk on Australian National Radio’s Late Night Live (July 2008).
‘New ancestral shrines after the cold war’, paper given at the conference ‘Cultures of Reconstruction’, Centre for Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge (June 2008), and at Oxford University’s Cold War Studies Group workshop (November 2007).
Talks at Hanyang University, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, Chonnam University, Yeungnam University, and the Institute of Peace Research, Cheju, Korea (April–June 2008).
‘The history of the cold war and the morality of kinship’, paper given at the Cheju 4.3 Sixtieth Anniversary International Conference, Cheju, Korea (April 2008, organised jointly with the Taiwanese committee for the commemoration of the 2.28 incidents and the Indonesian NGOs concerned with the investigation of the 1965 civilian massacres).
‘Writing an international history from village ethnography’, paper presented at the Association of Social Anthropologists conference ‘Pitch of Ethnography’, London School of Economics (March 2008).
‘Geertz Geertz’s legacies’, speech delivered at the American Anthropological Association conference in Washington DC (December 2007; printed in Anthropology News, March 2008).
Yangwol honorary lecture, School of International Culture Studies, Hanyang University, Korea (2008).

2002-2007

‘Remembering the Vietnam War’, distinguished lecture given at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley (October 2007).
‘Co so cach mang and the social network of war’, paper presented at the American Historical Association symposium ‘Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars’, University of Kentucky (October 2007).
Papers given at the British Association of Religious Studies conference ‘Religious Experience in Global Contexts’, Edinburgh (September 2007); the CNRS conference ‘Les identitiés corporelles au Vietnam’, Lyon (May 2007); the congress of the Scottish Association of American Studies, Edinburgh (March 2007); British Museum (May 2006); and the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Oxford (April 2006).
‘The ghosts of war and the spirit of cosmopolitanism’, paper presented at the Association of Social Anthropologists conference ‘Anthropology and Cosmopolitanism’, Keele (April 2006).
‘The political lives of war ghosts after the cold war’, paper presented at the conference ‘Affect in Political Life’, Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge (April 2006).
‘Death and moral economy’, paper presented at the conference ‘Moral Economy’, University of Lancaster (August 2005).
‘The cold war and the ambidextrous body’, paper presented at the conference ‘Vietnam’s Multiple Modernities’, Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge (May 2005).
‘The liberation from grievous death in central Vietnam’, paper presented at the World Congress of the International Association of History of Religions, Tokyo (March 2005).
‘The ethical implications of the Korean Army MIA missions’, speech delivered at the Korean War MIA affairs conference, General Headquarters of the Army, Taijon, Korea (December 2004).
Organised the panel ‘Perspectivism from the Anthropological Perspective’ at the Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Manchester (July 2003).
‘The dollarization of Vietnamese spirit money’, paper presented at the American Anthropological Association conference in New Orleans (November 2002); the Cornell Law School conference on ‘Cultural Approaches to the Asian Financial Market’ (April 2003); and the conference on ‘Property, Transaction and Creation’ at Cambridge University (May 2003).
‘The laughter of a Vietnamese amputee’, paper presented at the conference ‘Anthropology of Laughter’, University of St Andrews (November 2002).
Co-organised the Ninth International Hunter-and-Gatherers Conference, Edinburgh (2002).
Presented various papers on social history of the Vietnam War and Cold War social studies at Queens University of Belfast, University of Durham, London School of Economics, University of St. Andrews, Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, Aberdeen, Cambridge, Oxford, Free University of Brussels and elsewhere (2002–2007).

PUBLICATIONS

Books

After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, foreword by Drew Faust, 2006; Geertz prize; translated to Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese).
Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; Kahin prize, reviewed in the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books; translated to French).
The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010; translated to Korean; German translation underway, Kyung-Am prize).
North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012; co-authored with Byung-Ho Chung; translated to Korean and Japanese; Chinese translation in preparation).
After the Korean War: An Intimate History (single-authored book to appear in October 2019, Cambridge University Press Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare Series).

Articles

‘The saddle and the sledge: hunting as comparative narrative in Siberia and beyond’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (1998): 115-127.
‘Play the bear: myth and ritual in east Siberia’, History of Religions 38 (1999): 373-387.
‘Social relations before life: myth and comparative cultural analysis’, Journal of Korean Anthropology 32 (1999):149-209, (in Korean).
‘To hunt the black shaman: memory of the Great Purge in east Siberia’, Etnofoor 13 (2000): 33-50.
‘The Vietnamese ghost army’, Sexta Feira 7 (2003).
‘Ancestors and ghosts in a post-cold war Vietnam’, Journal of Korean Ethnology 12 (2003): 35-55 (in Korean).
‘Anatomy of US and South Korean massacres in the Vietnamese year of the monkey, 1968’, The Asia-Pacific Journal (June 2007, online journal, invited article of 10,000 words, http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2451).
‘The dollarization of Vietnamese ghost money’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007): 73-90.
‘The ghosts of the American War in Vietnam’, The Asia-Pacific Journal (January 2008, http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2645, reprinted in History News and Asia Times).
‘The ghosts of war and the spirit of cosmopolitanism’, History of Religions 48 (2008): 22-42.
‘Excavating the history of collaboration’, The Asia-Pacific Journal (July 2008, http://www.japanfocus.org/_Heonik_Kwon-Excavating_the_History_of_Collaboration).
‘The Korean War mass graves’, The Asia-Pacific Journal (August 2008, http://www.japanfocus.org/_Heonik_Kwon-The_Korean_War_Mass_Graves).
‘The global Cold War and contemporary anthropological research’, Social Science Webzine, No. 1, 2009 (in Korean, http://sse.nrf.go.kr/).
‘North Korea’s politics of longing’, Critical Asian Studies, 42 (2010): 3-24.
‘North Korea’s theatre state’, Korean Studies Forum, 4 (2010): 27-54.
‘Korean war traumas’, The Asia-Pacific Journal (September 20, 2010; http://japanfocus.org/-heonik-kwon/3413, reprinted in History News).
‘The power of family feelings’, H-Diplo 11 (2010): 15-18, available online at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XI-42.pdf.
‘L’esprit dans l’œuvre de Durkheim, Mauss et Hertz’, Revue du Mauss 36 (2010): 211-222 (in French).
‘Guilty by association’, Papers of the British Association for Korean Studies 13 (2011): 89-104.
‘The other’s Cold War’, H-Diplo 13 (2011), roundtable reviews of The Other Cold War available online at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XIII-6.pdf.
‘North Korea’s partisan family state’, Asia-Pacific Journal (July 9, 2012; http://www.japanfocus.org/-Byung_Ho-Chung/3789; co-authored with Byung-Ho Chung).
‘Rethinking traumas of war’, South East Asia Research 20 (2012): 227-237.
‘Perspectivism in social anthropology’, NatureCulture 1 (2012), available online at http://natureculture.sakura.ne.jp/PDF-00-the_Human_and_the_Social.html
‘Spirits in the work of Durkheim, Mauss and Hertz’, Journal of Classical Sociology 14 (2014): 122-131.
‘The plurality of the global Cold War’, Historical Criticism (2014, in Korean).
‘Bürgerkriegstote in Vietnam und Europa’, Mittelweg 36 (2014, in German).
‘Remembering the Cold War’, Situations 10 (2017): 85-98.
‘Revolution in the afterlife’, Religions 8 (2017).
‘Vietnam’s South Korean ghosts’, The New York Times, July 10, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/opinion/vietnam-war-south-korea.html
‘On tolerance’, UNESCO News 737 (2017).
‘North Korea today’, Anthropology Today 34 (2018).
‘American power in Korean shamanism’, Journal of Korean Religions 9 (2018).
‘Religions in Cold War Korea’, Journal of Korean Religions 9 (2018).
‘Les voisins invisibles’, Terrain 69 (2018).
‘Return to animism’, Interdisciplinary Science Review 43 (2018): 228-236.

Book Chapters

‘The globalization of culture?’, The Globalization of Culture (Seoul: Academy of Korean Studies Press, 1995, in Korean).
‘Movements and transgressions: human landscape in northeastern Sakhalin’, in S. Mousalimas (ed.) Arctic Ecology and Identity (Fullerton, CA: International Society for Trans-Oceanic Research, 1997).
‘The wealth of han (grievance)’, in M. Demeuldre (ed.) Sentiments doux-amers dans les musiques du monde (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002, in French).
‘The commemoration of war and transnational identity’, in A. Ogoshi (ed.) Thoughts on Postwar East Asia (Tokyo: Seikusha, 2006, in Japanese).
‘New ancestral shrines in South Korea’, in R. Frank, J. Hoare, S. Pares and P. Koellner (eds.) Korea Yearbook 2007 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
‘Co so cach mang and the social network of war’, in M. P. Bradley and M. B. Young (eds.) Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
‘Experiencing the Cold War’, in C. Sylvester (ed.) Experiencing War (London: Routledge, 2010).
‘Parallax visions in Dokdo-Takeshima disputes’, in M. Kim and B. Schwartz (eds.) Northeast Asia’s Difficult Pasts (New York: Palgrave, 2010).
‘The ghosts of war and the ethics of memory’, in M. Lambek (ed.) Anthropology of Ordinary Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
‘New ancestral shrines after the Cold War’, in G. Bowman (ed.) Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Inter-communal Relations (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012).
‘Auf der spur des Kalten Krieges im globalen sudden (in the wake of the Cold War in global south)’, in Erbe des Kalten Krieges (legacies of the Cold War), edited by Bernd Greiner, Tim B. Müller, and Klaas Voß (Hamburg: Hamburg Institute for Social Research, 2013, in German).
‘Time consciousness in North Korea’s state security discourse’, in Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest, and the Future, edited by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen (London: Routledge, 2013).
‘The social and political theory of the soul’, in Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, edited by Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek (London: Wiley, 2013).
‘Cold War in a Vietnamese community’, Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War, edited by Scott Laderman and Edwin Martini (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
‘Les corps portés disparus dans le Vietnam d’après-guerre’, A. Goscha and F. Guillemot (eds.) Vietnam, le corps en métamorphoses : Constructions sociales, représentations politiques, dégradations physiques (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2014, in French).
‘The transpacific Cold War’, in J. Hoskins and V. Nguyen (eds.) Transpacific Studies: Culture and Capital Between Asia and the United States (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014)
‘The Vietnam War traumas’, in A. Hinton and D. Hinton (eds.) Genocide and Mass Violence: Memory, Symptom and Recovery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
‘Can the dead suffer trauma?’ in C. Salazar and J. Bestard (eds.) Religion and Science as Forms of Life (Oxford: Berghahn, 2015).
‘Korean War mass graves’, in F. Fernandiz and A. Robben (eds.) Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
‘Missing bodies and homecoming spirits’, in B. Boyle (ed.) Looking Back on the Vietnam War: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016)
‘North Korea’s new cemetery of the Korean War fallen soldiers’, A. Jackson (ed.) The Invention of Tradition in Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2017).
‘Frazer’s ghosts, Wittgenstein’s ghosts’, in S. Palmie (ed.) The Mythology in Our Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
‘Ancestors’, in H. Callan, The International Encyclopaedia of Anthropology (London: John Wiley, 2018).
‘The violence of the Cold War’, in P. Dwyer (ed.) Cambridge History of Violence Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
‘The postcolonial Cold War’, in C. McGranahan (ed.) Ethnographies of the U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
‘Two color lines of the twentieth century’, in J. Heiser (ed.) Divided We Stand (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018).
‘Civilian death’, in A. Preston and H. Nguyen (eds) Cambridge History of the Vietnam War Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
‘Memories’, in A. Preston and H. Nguyen (eds) Cambridge History of the Vietnam War Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Books in Preparation

American Power in Korean Religions (co-authored book commissioned by the Fordham University Press).
The Lines of the Cold War (single-authored book in preparation, commissioned by Routledge Masters in Asian Studies).
Cambridge History of the Korean War (Cambridge University Press, general editor, 3 volumes).
Korea in 1919 (special issue in Korea Journal, general editor).
The World in 1919 (Cambridge University Press, editor).
The End of the Korean War (single-authored book commissioned by Rowman & Littlefield).
The Culture of Peace: UNESCO and Anthropology (co-authored book in preparation, commissioned by University of California Press)

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