Todd A . Henry

Todd A. Henry (Ph.D., UCLA, 2006; Assistant/Associate Professor, UCSD, 2009-Present) is a specialist of modern Korea with an interest in the period of Japanese rule (1910-1945) and its postcolonial afterlives (1945-present). A social and cultural historian attuned to global forces that (re) produce lived spaces, he studies cross-border processes linking South Korea, North Korea, Japan, and the US in the creation of “Hot War” militarisms, the transpacific practice of medical sciences, and the lived experiences of heteropatriarchal capitalism. A historian of gender, sex, and sexuality, Dr. Henry also seeks to expand Euro-American-centric approaches to queerness, transgenderism, and intersexuality through a sustained focus on Asian forms of embodiment that center the geopolitics of imperialism/colonialism, military occupation, and diasporic mobility.

Dr. Henry’s first book, _Assimilating Seoul_ (University of California Press, 2014; Korean translation, 2020), which won a 2020 Sejong Book Prize in History, Geography, and Tourism, addressed the violent but contested role of public spaces in colonial Korea. He has written several related articles on questions of place, race, and nation in colonizing and decolonizing movements on the peninsula.

In recent years, Dr. Henry has been working on several academic studies and creative works on global queer Korea, including two monographs [_Profits of Queerness: Media, Medicine, and Citizenship in Authoritarian South Korea, 1950-1980_ (under peer review) and _Bodies of Excess: Sex Tourism, the AIDS Crisis, and Transgender Advocacy in Late-Authoritarian South Korea, 1980-1995_ (writing in progress) and two films [a 30-minute documentary on the history of gay sociality (“Paradise,” 2023) with Minki Hong and a feature-length piece on South Korea’s first male fashion designer, André Kim (1935-2010), and his relationship to post-1945 Hawaiʻi]. Centering non-normative dimensions of capitalist development in (post-) authoritarian South Korea, these interdisciplinary projects explore the ideological functions and subcultural dynamics of same-sex sexuality and gender variance in connection to middlebrow journalism and urban entertainment, anti-communist modes of citizenship and heteropatriarchal labor, in addition to bodily autonomy and personal health in the contexts of the global sexual revolution, gender confirmation and intersex struggles, and ongoing stigma against sexually transmitted diseases. Samples of this new research appear in his edited volume, _Queer Korea_ (Duke University Press, 2020; Korean translation, 2023) and as “The AIDS Panic and ‘Disease Boundaries in Late-Authoritarian South Korea” (East-West Center Research Speaker Series, August 21, 2024). Another forthcoming book – tentatively entitled _Imperial Collisions: Japanese and Western Gay Sex Tourisms in Post-Colonial/Hot War Asia-Pacific,_ a sample of which was published in _The Transgender Studies Reader, Vol. 2_ (Routledge, 2013) – will examine how pre-World War II histories of empire and militarism informed articulations of virile masculinity and practices of gay and transgender sex tourism in postwar Japan and across its former empire as well as in relation to other competing “sex-empires,” including that of the US.

Dr. Henry has received two Fulbright grants (Kyoto University, 2004-2005; Hanyang and Ewha Womans Universities, 2013), two fellowships from the Korea Foundation (Seoul National University, 2003-2004; Harvard University, 2008-2009), and separate fellowships from the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies (Seoul National University, 2019) and the East-West Center (University of Hawaiʻi, 2024). At UCSD, he is an affiliate faculty member of Critical Gender Studies, Science Studies, and Film Studies. From 2013 until 2018, Dr. Henry served as the inaugural director of Transnational Korean Studies, the recipient of a $600,000 grant from the Academy of Korean Studies as a Core University Program for Korean Studies.  Fluent in English, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean, with some French, Dr. Henry has taught courses in Fort Collins (Colorado), San Diego (California), Seoul (South Korea), Paris (France), San Jose (Costa Rica), and Berlin (Germany).  He has offered classroom, academic, and public lectures across the world, and is dedicated to establishing engaged collaborations with students, scholars, activists, artists, and other citizens seeking to make their own histories.