I am an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests lie broadly in the connections between care and power, as well as the intersecting histories of humanitarianism, (social) science, and welfare.
I am currently an Assistant Professor (tenure-track Associate Senior Lecturer) at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, within the Department of History at Lund University.
I received my MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and my PhD in Korean Studies from the University of Tübingen. Prior to my appointment at Lund, I was the 2023–24 SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Critical Korean Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
My book in progress, tentatively titled Governing Care: Professional Social Work and the Making of the International Adoption Industry in Cold War South Korea, 1953–1979, traces the formation of the world’s largest and longest-running international adoption program, through the lens of professional social work. I embed the adoption program in the broader formation of the care system that emerged out of a complex web of power and dependency among Western and Korean social workers and humanitarians, and the authoritarian state. This project is based on extensive archival research in six countries, oral history interviews with key professionals, and examination of personal adoption files. My work has been published in the Journal of Social History and the Journal of Asian Studies.
My research has been supported by various institutions, including the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the Korea Foundation, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University, the Clarke Chambers Travel Fellowship at the University of Minnesota, and the Presbyterian Historical Society Research Fellowship.
I can be reached at youngeun.koo@ace.lu.se.
My first name, Youngeun, is pronounced as [Young-un] with a soft ending.