New York Conference on AsiAn Studies 2026

Keynote Lecture on Friday

Eleana Kim

(Professor / Anthropology and Asian American Studies, UC Irvine)

Eleana Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She specializes in kinship, human/nonhuman ecologies, migration, and the senses, with a regional focus on contemporary South Korea. She is the author of two award-winning books, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoption and the Politics of Belonging (2010) and Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ (2022), both of which were published by Duke University Press. She is also the co-editor, with environmental historians David Fedman and Albert Park, of Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (Cornell University Press, 2023). She teaches courses on anthropological theory, kinship, migration, transnational Korea, and the senses.

“Transpacific Ecologies of War“

From nuclear test sites, to atomic bombs, to land mines, to napalm, Asia and the Pacific have a long history of serving as the testing grounds and proving grounds for militarized technologies of war. Multiple ecologically and psychically toxic ecologies link geographies across the Pacific as well as between Asia and the U.S. This talk focuses on the Korean Demilitarized Zone as a transpacific ecology of war to offer an inter-referencing approach (borrowing from Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method), that can decenter conventional geopolitical relations and planetary imaginaries.