Yoon Walker

About

Yoon Walker is a historian of modern and contemporary Korea and a Research Associate at the Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS University of London.

Her work centers on the Korean War, human rights under South Korea's authoritarian regimes, and the interpretation of difficult and contested pasts. She completed her PhD in Korean Studies at SOAS in 2026, with a dissertation on institutionalized human rights violations during the authoritarian period between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Alongside her research, she writes and speaks for audiences beyond the university, and has helped build community among scholars of Korea. She currently serves as Secretary of the British Association of Korean Studies, and has been Chair of Korean Researchers in the UK and a council advisor to the UK chapter of the Peaceful Unification Advisory Council.

Research

Her research asks how states build violence into their own institutions, how societies later come to terms with that violence, and who decides which painful pasts are remembered and which are left in silence.

Her doctoral work examined three institutions of confinement and forced labor that operated under South Korea's authoritarian governments — Sŏn'gam Academy, the Sŏsan Development Group, and Brothers Home. Reading them together against the administrative record, she argues that these were not isolated scandals but state violence embedded in official policy, and that all three shared strikingly similar structures, practices, and forms of violence despite operating in different times and places.

Her current project turns from how violence was institutionalized to how its memory is made public, following three sites — Gwanghwamun Square, the May 18th Democratic Plaza in Gwangju, and the Jeju 4·3 Peace Park — where a place of repression became a place of public memory. She is also developing her dissertation into a monograph.

Teaching

Yoon has taught across modern Korean and East Asian history at SOAS, as a lecturer for Contemporary Korean History and as a seminar tutor for The Other Korea: North Korea since 1945, East Asian Imperialisms, and History and Memory in East Asian Cultures.

She believes students learn best when they have room to form their own ideas, exchange them with peers, and receive feedback in a comfortable setting. She teaches with film, music, and current events as much as textbooks, and draws on the diversity of her classrooms as a shared learning resource. She also enjoys mentoring students informally, from those preparing to study in Korea to those applying to graduate programs.

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

• 2026“Sŏn'gam Academy: The Island of Boys — State Violence, Forced Labor, and Institutional Continuity in Modern Korea, 1942–1982,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. (under review)
• 2026“Contested Futures: The Liberation Space (Haebang Gonggan) of Post-1945 Korea and the Politics of Its Memory,” European Journal of Korean Studies. (under review)
• 2026“Divergent Routes to History Before the Truth Commission in South Korean Confinement Cases, 1987–2024,” Korean Histories. (under review)

Public writing

• 2025“What lies ahead for South Korea after the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol?,” The Conversation.
• 2025“South Korea: failed arrest of impeached president sets stage for more turmoil in 2025,” The Conversation.
• 2024“South Korea at a crossroads after president is impeached,” The Conversation.

Selected Conferences & Talks

• 2026“From a Chamber of Silence to a Square of Democracy,” History Museums in South Korea and Beyond, Kyoto University.
• 2026“Nostalgia Without Experience: Prosthetic Memory, Digital Media, and the Re-production of the Pre-digital Past in Contemporary South Korea,” Digitally Mediated Nostalgia in Korea Conference, Palacký University.
• 2026“Coerced Brides of the Development State: Forced Marriage and the Erasure of Women in South Korea's Sŏsan Development Group (1961–1966),” Hidden Stories: International Seminar of Women in Korean History, Pompeu Fabra University.
• 2025“Island of the Boys — Heritagization of Violence and Death,” 18th Kyujanggak International Symposium, Seoul National University.
• 2025Discussant, Remembering ‘Comfort Women’ Conference, SOAS.
• 2025“A Journey to Healing and Justice through Art: Brothers’ Home and Transitional Justice in South Korea,” Cambridge Heritage Seminar.

Public Engagement

• 2026Researcher & translator, “Liberation Space 1948: Lines of Flight,” book for the Korean Pavilion, 61st Venice Biennale.
• 2026Guest commentator, London Korean Film Club.
• 2025Interviewed as a Korea expert by France 24 on South Korea's political crisis.

Contact

For inquiries, collaborations, or talks, please get in touch.