Presented by Donghyun Woo, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

The event will take place at May 17, 9:00 am (Seoul Time), May 16, 5:00 pm (Los Angeles Time), May 16, 8:00 pm (New York Time)

Please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAkc-CvpzMtHtcDOYtWeod9lLOaZlma4AR4

Why did the Democratic People's Republic of Korea send its agricultural experts to Soviet breadbaskets, including Ukraine and Uzbekistan, in the post-Korean War 1950s? This presentation argues that Pyongyang's desire to balance expertise development and expenditure reduction enables us to efficiently challenge the prevailing narratives of North Korean history studies that view 1956 as the most important moment for Kim Il-sung's nationalistic Juche politics. By reconstructing the untold history of North Korea's Labor Hero An Tal-su and his fellow tourists in the Soviet Union, this presentation examines how bilateral programs of "scientific excursion" were organized and what different North Korean actors aimed to achieve in those rare opportunities, in a bid to show that neither ideology nor nationalism mattered that much in North Korean politics. This presentation also explores how to visualize relevant Russian data, partly to contribute to the growing academic field of digital history.

About the Presenter

Donghyun Woo is a historian who explores the entanglement of science, technology, environment, and medicine in the Cold War. He is interested in combining declassified archival data with digital history approaches. He has translated three academic monographs and co-translated three Russian material books. His articles appeared in The Historical Journal and The Korean Journal for the History of Science. He has presented in important venues, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the University of Oslo, and SOAS University of London. One of his hobbies is tinkering with digital tools and programming languages.