James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean StudiesThe James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies is pleased to welcome Kim Lacey as the Moon Family Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2026–2027 academic year. We are delighted to have Dr. Lacey join the Kim Center community and look forward to her contributions in research, teaching, and intellectual engagement throughout the year.
Kim Yehbohn Lacey is a historian of the Korean diaspora, empires, and the borderlands of Northeast Asia. She is currently working on her book manuscript based on her dissertation, Koreitsy: Koreans in the Former Soviet Republics, 1863-Present. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research conducted across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Japan, South Korea, and the United States, the project examines how Korean communities in the former Soviet republics have developed evolving, localized understandings of identity and belonging across multiple generations. By decentering state violence and examining the everyday life through sources like songs and food, the research explores how Koreitsy navigated displacement and built meaningful lives on their own terms for the past 160 years.
Lacey is a contributor to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the History of Race in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia. She has also published on Sakhalin Koreans (Routledge, 2023) and the use of music as historical evidence (University of Illinois, 2025). She earned her Ph.D. in History from Washington University in St. Louis, an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Eurasian and East European Studies from Bowdoin College.
Her research has been supported by numerous competitive fellowships and grants, including the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, the Korea Foundation Fellowship, the Title VIII Research Award, the Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Harvard-Yenching Library Grant, and the American Historical Association’s Bernadotte E. Schmitt Research Grant.