Alyssa Park

Associate Professor
Biography

Dr. Park is on research leave Spring 2024.

Alyssa Park is a historian of modern Korea.  Her research interests include borderlands, transnational migration, and empire in East Asia, including Russia.  She is the author of Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945(Cornell University Press, 2019), which examines how questions of sovereignty—claims over land and subjects—became a central concern to multiple states as they confronted the unprecedented mobility of Koreans.  Based on sources from Korea, the Russian Far East, St. Petersburg, and Manchuria, the book explores the history of the Korean community across Russia and China, illuminating the process by which this border region and people were claimed as belonging to surrounding states. 

Dr. Park is currently working on a book about population displacement in the two Koreas. Through the lens of Korean “refugees,” it brings together the transnational histories of postcolonial Korea, nascent South Korean regime, and Soviet and U.S. occupations during the critical interregnum of 1945-50. 

Dr. Park’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center, Kennan Institute, Yale Council on East Asian Studies, Korea Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies / Mellon, International Research and Exchanges Board, and Fulbright-Hays.  She earned an AB from Princeton University and a PhD in History from Columbia University. 

Teaching

  • HIST:1607  Civilizations of Asia: Korea
  • HIST:2151  Intro to History Major — Global Asia
  • HIST:2684 Korean War: Local and Global History 
  • HIST:3685  Modern Korean History
  • HIST:3996  Honors Thesis Workshop 
  • HIST:6135  Space and Borderlands of Asia
  • HIST:6158  Approaches to Teaching Global History
  • HIST:7622  Readings in Modern Korean History

Publications

Books

Articles

Research areas
  • Modern Korean History and Northeast Asia
  • Diaspora and Migration
  • Borderlands
  • International History
Alyssa Park
Columbia University
Address

174 Schaeffer Hall (SH)
Iowa City, IA 52242
United States