New Books in Korean Studies

Nicolas Levi is a researcher at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has authored numerous books related to North Korea and is a regular commentator on the country’s elite social and political structures.

I Was a North Korean Diplomat: Inside the Secret World of Pyongyang's Foreign Service (Independently Published, 2026) is Levi’s tenth book, a collaborative work based on extensive dialogues with Han Jin-myung (a pseudonym),  a former member of the North Korean elite who served in a specialized military drone unit and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, before defecting in 2015. The book provides a rare, ground-level look at the life of the North Korean upper class, tracing Han’s journey from a privileged childhood in Pyongyang to the high-pressure world of international diplomacy and illicit regime fundraising in Southeast Asia.

Through Han’s testimony, the book explores the psychological realities of loyalty, the "golden cage" of the North Korean elite, and the climate of fear following the 2013 execution of Jang Song-thaek, offering readers a unique perspective on the inner workings of the North Korean state.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.
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Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026) by Dr. Patrick Chung traces the origins of today’s United States-led capitalist world economy. The nation’s foreign policy during the Cold War saw two unprecedented developments: the continuous global deployment of US soldiers and the creation of a permanent worldwide military base network. In the process, the US military came to control the flow of billions of dollars, large-scale construction projects at home and abroad, the purchase of countless goods and services, and the employment of millions of soldiers and workers. In other words, the Cold War US military became the world’s leading economic actor.To illuminate the political and economic consequences of the US military’s globalization, Dr. Chung focuses on its activities in South Korea between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Chung shows how the Korean War and the subsequent militarization of South Korea became an important site for the spread of a new economic system, which he calls military-industrial capitalism. Sustained by providing the infrastructure and materials for the US military’s globalization, military-industrial capitalism influenced the development of governments, corporations, and workers throughout the US-led “free world.” As military-industrial capitalism expanded, more of the world depended on the physical and administrative standards used by the US military. Ironically, the creation of a globalized economy facilitated both South Korea’s “economic miracle” and the decline of US industrial might.To clarify how these broader developments transformed everyday life in South Korea and around the world, Standardizing Empire explores three of South Korea’s leading multinational corporations today: shipping company Hanjin, steelmaker POSCO, and car manufacturer Hyundai. These case studies not only trace the companies’ early ties to the US military but also explain how they came to produce, sell, and employ workers worldwide, including in the United States.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Nationalism today depends on the perception of victimhood. The historical memory of past suffering endows nationalist movements with political legitimacy and a sense of moral superiority. Koreans recall Japanese colonial atrocities, while Japan commemorates the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Israel sanctifies the Holocaust and Poland trumpets the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Even Germany and Russia, perpetrators of historical crimes, today cast themselves as victims by pointing to national suffering.

In this theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich book, Jie-Hyun Lim offers a new way to understand nationalism and its political instrumentalization of suffering, developing the concept of “victimhood nationalism” and exploring it in a range of global settings. Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age (Columbia UP, 2025) examines relations among Poland, Germany, Israel, Korea, and Japan, focusing on how memories of colonialism, the Holocaust, and Stalinist terror have converged and intertwined in transnational spaces. With an emphasis on memory formation, Lim scrutinizes how perpetrators in Germany and Japan transformed themselves into victims, as well as how nationalists in Poland, Korea, and Israel portray themselves as hereditary victims in order to rebut external criticism. He considers the construction of nations as victims and perpetrators, tracing the interaction of history and memory. Ultimately, the book contends, challenging victimhood nationalism is necessary to overcome the endless competition over national suffering and instead promote reconciliation, mutual understanding, and transnational solidarity.

Dr. Jie-Hyun Lim is the CIPSH Chairholder of Global Easts, Distinguished Professor, and founding director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University. In 2025–2026, he is the Class of 1955 Visiting Professor in Global Studies at Williams College. His many books include Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing (Columbia, 2022).

Visit the Critical Global Studies Institute’s homepage: here

Buy Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age: here

About the host: Leslie Hickman is an Anthropology graduate student at Emory University. She has an MA in Korean Studies and a KO-EN translation certificate from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. You can contact her at [email protected]
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In From Juche to Jesus: A Study of Worldview Transformation Among North Korean Defector Christians in South Korea (Pickwick Publications, 2025), Su Hwa Keum explores the profound spiritual journeys of North Korean defectors as they navigate the transition from Juche ideology to faith in Christ. While many encounter the gospel during their escape, genuine transformation requires more than exposure – it is a deep, internal process. Through personal interviews and grounded theory research, Keum examines the key factors and processes that lead to lasting worldview transformation. She highlights how experiencing God enables defectors to “replace the logic of survival with the logic of grace.” A scholarly, insightful and deeply personal work, From Juche to Jesus sheds light on the journey of faith and renewal, offering a powerful perspective on how the gospel reshapes hearts, minds, and entire worldviews.
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K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today (U Michigan Press, 2026) insists that K-pop fan practices and activities constitute a central productive force, shaping not only K-pop’s explosive global popularity, but also K-pop’s cultural impacts, politics, and horizons of possibility. Over the past three decades, the K-pop fandom and its activities have expanded, intensified, and diversified along myriad dimensions, assuming novel social, technological, and economic forms, some of which are unique to K-pop, and some of which reflect broader cultural and industrial logics of globalized mass entertainment culture. Areum Jeong argues that K-pop fans, in performing deokhu—a Korean term connoting an “avid fan”—perform a materialization of affective labor that also seeks to produce good relationships between asymmetrically positioned actors in the K-pop ecosystem.

Through an autoethnography of becoming a K-pop deokhu, Jeong connects their experiences to generations of K-pop fans, showing simultaneously how fandom practices have shifted over time and the intricacies of fan labor participation. This personal connection paved the way for participant-observation and co-performer witnessing methodologies in the study, which crucially allowed for collaborating with fans whose communal pursuits have been stigmatized by dominant discourses that denigrate their activities as solely addictive, uncritical, and wasteful. Jeong’s genre-spanning corpus of fan activities and analyzing its contexts and contents represents an important contribution to the making of a fan archive that is also an archive of affective labor.
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