Youngeun Koo

Youngeun* Koo is a tenure-track Associate Senior Lecturer of Contemporary Korean Society, a position partially funded by the Korea Foundation. Her research focuses on the connections between care and power, as well as the intersecting histories of Western humanitarianism and modern governance in postcolonial societies.

She earned her MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and her PhD in Korean Studies from the University of Tübingen. Prior to joining Lund, she was the SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University (2023–24) and a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine (2022–23).

Koo is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Governing Care: Professional Social Work and the Making of the International Adoption Industry in Cold War South Korea, 1953–1979. The book examines the emergence of the world’s most enduring and extensive international adoption program through the lens of professional social work. Based on extensive archival research across six countries, oral history interviews with key professionals, and analyses of personal adoption files, it situates the adoption program within the broader formation of the care system that emerged out of a complex web of power and dependency among Western and Korean social workers, humanitarians, and the authoritarian state. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Social History and the Journal of Asian Studies. Her second project examines Scandinavian medical aid in Cold War South Korea as a site of transnational knowledge production on the body, health, and disability.

At Lund, Koo teaches BA and MA courses on modern and contemporary Korean societies, body politics and governance in Southeast and East Asia, and research methods in Asian Studies. 

She has also been featured in media outlets such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Sydsvenskan, where she has commented on a range of issues related to South Korea.

Her website: https://www.youngeunkoo.com/ 

*Pronounced [Young-oon], with a soft ending.