Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor of History, University of Iowa

Expert Bio

Alyssa Park is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa.  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, and Manchuria, it explores the history of the Korean community across Russia and China, illuminating how this sensitive border region and people were claimed by surrounding states.  She is currently working on a book on migration and population displacement in the two Koreas during the critical interregnum (1945-1950) before the Korean War.  Dr. Park’s research has been supported by the Wilson Center, Kennan Institute, American Council of Learned Societies / Mellon, Yale Council on East Asian Studies, and Fulbright-Hays.  She received her AB from Princeton University and PhD from Columbia University.

Wilson Center Project

Homeward: Korean Refugees and the Politics of Occupation, Division and War, 1945-50

Major Publications

Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945  (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019; Weatherhead East Asian Institute Series). 

“Making ‘Refugees’: Repatriates, Migrants, and Institutions of Care in Liberated South Korea, 1945-1950.” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 36 no. 2 (Dec. 2023): 621-54

"Navigating Northeast Asia in Vladivostok: A Review of the Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East," Dissertation Reviews, Oct. 31, 2013. http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/5447

Previous Terms

January 1-July 15, 2014