All episodes

Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions: The Roots of Modern Korean with Daniel Pieper (U Toronto Press, 2026)

Jerome Sauvage, "Witness to North Korea: Three Years on the Ground in the DPRK" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Remco E Breuker, "Not Everything Unfolds as Anticipated: Selections from Yi Kyubo’s Tongguk Yi Sangguk Chip" (U Hawaii Press, 2026)

Voices from North Korea: Refugees Tell Their Stories

Jieun Baek, "Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness" (Yale UP, 2026)

Edward Goldring, "Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Jin Y. Park and Sumi Lee eds., "Korean Buddhism: Selected Readings from Primary Texts" (U Hawaii Press, 2026)

Jonathan Cheng, "Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult" (Knopf, 2026)

Jinwon Kim, "Koreatown, NYC: The Consumption of a Transnational Brand" (NYU Press, 2026)

Don Baker, "Korean New Religions" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Paige Towers, "What They Stole: A Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption" (U Iowa Press, 2026)

Hannah Shepherd, "The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region" (U California Press, 2025)

Hannah Shepherd, "The Narrowing Sea: Fukuoka, Pusan, and the Rise and Fall of an Imperial Region" (U California Press, 2025)

Gregg A. Brazinsky, "Cold War Comrades: An Emotional History of the Sino-North Korean Alliance" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Fyodor Tertititsky, "Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea" (Hurst, 2026)

David Krolikoski, "Lyrical Translation: The Creation of Modern Poetry in Colonial Korea" (U Hawai'i Press, 2026)

Myung-jin Han with Nicolas Levi, "I Was a North Korean Diplomat: Inside the Secret World of Pyongyang's Foreign Service" (Independently Published, 2026)

Patrick Chung, "Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)

Jie-Hyun Lim, "Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Su Hwa Keum, "From Juche to Jesus: A Study of Worldview Transformation Among North Korean Defector Christians in South Korea" (Pickwick Publications, 2025)

Areum Jeong, "K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today" (U Michigan Press, 2026)

Min Joo Lee, "Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

Re-examining the Women’s Movement in Cold War South Korea and Beyond

Serk-Bae Suh, "Against the Chains of Utility: Sacrifice and Literature in 1970s and 1980s South Korea" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)

Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025)

Todd A. Henry ed., "Queer Korea" (Duke UP, 2025)

Stephanie K. Kim, "Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul" (MIT Press, 2023)

Benoit Berthelier and Immanuel Kim, "Hidden Heros: Anthology of North Korean FIction" (Anthem, 2025)

Zev Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese" (U Washington Press, 2025)

Gregory N. Evon, "Salvaging Buddhism to Save Confucianism in Choson Korea (1392-1910)" (Cambria Press, 2023)

Fyodor Tertitskiy, "Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung" (Hurst UP, 2025)

Ryan Klejment-Lavin, "Evil: A North Korean Christian Refugee Perspective" (American Society of Missiology, 2024)

Christopher Hanscom, "Impossible Speech: The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Zev J. Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese" (U Washington Press, 2025)

Pil Ho Kim, "Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

Kornel Chang, "A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under U.S. Occupation" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Sarah Ahn and Nam Soon Ahn, "Umma: A Korean Mom's Kitchen Wisdom and 100 Family Recipes" (America's Test Kitchen, 2025)

Tycho van der Hoog, "Comrades Beyond the Cold War: North Korea and the Liberation of Southern Africa" (Hurst, 2025)

Joseph A. Seeley, "Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Hye Seung Chung, "Cinema Under National Reconstruction: State Censorship and South Korea's Cold War Film Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, "Bong Joon Ho" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

Seungsook Moon, "Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro, "Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Willingness for climate action in South Korea and Finland: A cross-cultural comparison

Sixiang Wang, "Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Victor D. Cha, "The Black Box: Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Timothy Gitzen, "Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses" (Helsinki UP, 2023)

Tristan A. Volpe, "Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Russell Thomas, "Tofu: A Culinary History" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

Park Jeong-Mi, "The State's Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea" (U California Press, 2024)

Dennis Wuerthner, "Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

Satoru Hashimoto, "Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Jinhyun Cho, "English Language Ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the Past and Present" (Springer, 2017)

Christopher Lovins, "King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea" (SUNY Press, 2019)

Christina Yi et al., "Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)

Ed Pulford, "Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Viren Murthy, "Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Youngna Kim, "Korean Art Since 1945: Challenges and Changes" (Brill, 2024)

Joan E. Cho, "Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

South Korea after the 2024 Parliamentary Elections

Andre Schmid, "North Korea's Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953-1965" (U California Press, 2024)

SunAh M. Laybourn, "Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants" (NYU Press, 2024)

David Savran, "Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sandra Fahy, "Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record" (Columbia UP, 2019)

Andrew David Jackson, "The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

Hwisang Cho, "The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea" (U Washington Press, 2020)

Alyssa M. Park, “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki, "Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire" (Routledge, 2023)

Elise Hu, "Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital" (Dutton, 2023)

June Hee Kwon, "Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers" (Duke UP, 2023)

Shellen Xiao Wu, "Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Hannah Michell, "Excavations: A Novel" (One World, 2023)

Joo Ok Kim, "Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War" (Temple UP, 2022)

Hieyoon Kim, "Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea" (U California Press, 2023)

A Better Way to Buy Books

Suzy Kim, "Among Women Across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Chuyun Oh, "K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media" (Routledge, 2022)

Don J. Wyatt, "Slavery in East Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Olga Fedorenko, "Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)

Miya Qiong Xie, "Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Michael J. Seth, "Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World" (Tuttle Publishing, 2023)

Sheila Miyoshi Jager, "The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Victor Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo, "Korea: A New History of South and North" (Yale UP, 2023)

Suk-Young Kim, "Surviving Squid Game: A Guide to K-Drama, Netflix, and Global Streaming Wars" (Applause Books, 2023)

Chris Suh, "The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Monica Macias, "Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity" (Duckworth, 2023)

Neither Friend nor Enemy: Sweden-North Korea Relations

David Weiss, "The God Susanoo and Korea in Japan’s Cultural Memory: Ancient Myths and Modern Empire" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Aram Hur, "Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Kevin Blackburn, "The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory" (National U of Singapore Press, 2022)

Ruth Rogaski, "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

South Korea, Technology, and Globalization

Between the Streets and the Assembly: South Korean Social Movements before and after Democratization

Ronald H. Spector, "A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955" (Norton, 2023)

Dan Slater and Joseph Wong, "From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Ksenia Chizhova, "Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Leah Kalmanson, "Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

95 Intercultural Buddhism and Philosophy: A Discussion with Jin Y. Park

Jieun Baek, “North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society” (Yale UP, 2016)

Jini Kim Watson, "Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization" (Fordham UP, 2021)