Youngeun Koo

Youngeun* Koo is Assistant Professor of Korean Studies, a position partially funded by the Korea Foundation. Her research examines the transnational politics of care: how welfare, humanitarianism, and professional expertise have served as instruments of modern governance, producing exclusion and harm in the very name of protection, across the postcolonial and Cold War worlds.

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 held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Irvine (as a Korea Foundation Fellow) and at Harvard University (as SBS Korean Studies Fellow).

Her first book, titled Governing Care: Professional Social Work and the Making of the International Adoption System in Cold War South Korea, is currently under review. It interrogates the formation of the world’s most extensive international adoption program through the institutional and ideological frameworks of professional social work, drawing on archival research in six countries, oral history interviews with key professionals, and the examination of personal adoption files. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Social History and the Journal of Asian Studies. 

She is also developing a second project on Scandinavian medical aid to South Korea during the Cold War, tracing how actors from the neutral periphery of the bloc conflict came to operate at its frontline, producing and circulating knowledge about the modern body, gender, and disability.

At Lund, Koo teaches BA and MA courses on modern and contemporary Korea, body politics in East Asia, an introduction to Asian Studies, and research methods.

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.

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