Nan Kim

Nan Kim is Associate Professor in the Departments of History and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she serves as the Interim Co-Director of the Museum Studies Program. She is the Faculty Lead for the Working Group on Science and Technology Studies at the Center for 21st Century Studies. 

Her research interests include historical trauma and the contemporary interpretation of contested events; visual culture, protest memory, and long-term dissent movements; technoscientific governance and the nuclear Anthropocene as among the defining concerns of global contemporary history; the curation and construction of knowledge about oceans and geosciences; environmental and economic anthropology; Museum Studies; and Science and Technology Studies. Her work has appeared in several publications, including Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (Cornell University Press, 2023), The Journal of Asian Studies, and Arte Internacional (Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá). Her forthcoming chapter, “The Fukushima Wastewater Controversy across Japan, Korea, and the Nuclear Pacific: Geopolitics of Scientific Uncertainty and the Seoul Fulcrum,” will appear in Korea in the Context of US-China Competition, edited by Kevin Gray and Antonio Fiori (Routledge, in production). She is the author of Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide (Lexington, 2017), which won the Scott Bills Memorial Prize from the Peace History Society, an affiliate of the American Historical Association.

Among recent projects: In May 2024, she was a spotlight speaker at the symposium on “Fragility,” hosted by the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore, Zagreb, and co-organized by the University of Zadar, Croatia, as part of the EU-sponsored project “Digital Aestheticization of Fragile Environments.” In October 2024, she gave the 55th Annual Morris Fromkin Memorial Lecture, entitled “Environmental Crisis and Social Justice in the New Nuclear Age: Contemporary Legacies of Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell,” organized by Special Collections at the UWM Libraries. Most recently, she guest-edited “The Martial Law Crisis and Democratic Renewal in South Korea” (September 2025), a special section for Critical Asian Studies.

In addition to her academic research, she has consulted for museums, historical societies, public projects, and community-based groups in Korea, the US, and the UK. Her applied and engaged work is informed by her background as a scholar-activist, journalist, and editor, while drawing upon prior experience as a museum administrator in her native hometown, New York City.

She serves as a councilor (2024–2026) on the board of the Society for East Asian Anthropology and chairs SEAA's 2026 David Plath Media Award Committee. She is as a member of the committee for the 2026 E. Ohnuki-Tierney Book Award in Historical Anthropology, administered by AAA's General Anthropology Division. She has also served as a review panelist for the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology program.

She holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and during her doctoral studies, she received Honorable Mention in the graduate student paper competition held by the Society for Economic Anthropology for the Harold K. Schneider Prize. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, where she won the Edwin H. Tumin Memorial Prize, the senior-thesis writing prize awarded by the Department of English Language and Literature.