Drop-in hours

• Thursdays, 12 - 1:30 p.m. in person and 1:30 - 3 p.m. on Zoom; or by appointment

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

• Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1945 Cornell University Press (2019)

Articles

• "Making ‘Refugees': Repatriates, Migrants, and Institutions of Care in Liberated South Korea, 1945–1950" Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 36.2 (2023): 621-654
• "Korean Studies in the Global Humanities: A Roundtable Discussion” The Journal of Korean Studies 24.2 (2019): 393–410