Soyoung Suh
Associate Professor of History
Korea Foundation Professor
Assossicate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Soyoung Suh graduated from the University of California in Los Angeles in 2007 with a thesis entitled "Korean Medicine between the Local and the Universal: 1600-1945." Her dissertation examines the rise of an indigenous identity in medicine, which was intertwined with regionalism, nationalism and colonialism. After spending one year at Harvard University as a Post Doctoral Fellow in the "history of modern science and technology in East Asia," she was affiliated with the University of Westminster in London collaborating in a research project entitled "Treating the Liver: Towards A Transnational History of Medicine in East Asia, 1500-2000" funded by the Wellcome Trust. Her articles are published in Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, Asia Pacific Perspectives, and Korean Journal of Medical History. She revised her dissertation into a book titled Naming the Local: Medicine, Language, and Identity in Korea since the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017). She is now interested in the transnational history of breast cancer, which will explore the origins of gendered medical culture in post-World War II Korea.
Contact
Department(s)
Asian Societies, Cultures and Languages
Education
- B.S. Seoul National University
- M.S. Seoul National University
- Ph.D. University of California Los Angeles
Selected Publications
Soyoung Suh, Naming the Local: Medicine, Language, and Identity in Korea since the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017) Harvard East Asian Monograph Series, 404.
___________, "Rethinking Breast Mountain (yuam): Surgical Treatments of Breast Cancer in Korea, 1959–1993." Asia Pacific Perspectives 14, no. 1 (Fall 2016), 2–26.
___________, "Cases of Female Patients from Miscellaneous Writings by Ujam Chang T'ae-gyŏng (張泰慶, 1809–1887)." Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity 11, no. 1–2 (2016): 192–206.
___________, "Shanghanlun in Korea, 1610–1945." Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity 8, no. 2 (2015): 423–57.
Works In Progress
Sudden Transition and Enduring Past: Breast Cancer in Korea 1910–2010
(work in progress)