Jaehwan Hyun

Jaehwan Hyun is a historian of science working on the Cold War history of human biology and environmental sciences with a focus on transnational connections between South Korea, Japan, and the United States. Currently Jaehwan is living in Busan where he works as an assistant professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Pusan National University. He received his PhD in 2018 at Seoul National University, with a dissertation examining the role of geopolitics and international collaboration in the mutual constitution of human hereditary research and national identity in South Korea. Jaehwan worked at UCLA Institute of Society and Genetics (2017–2018), Tokyo University of Science (2018), and the MPIWG (2018–2020). He is working on several projects related to the Cold War reconstruction of science, people, and the environment in South Korea and Japan. While at the MPIWG (virtually), he will examine the way in which the Cold War anxiety of nuclear wars and environment contamination shaped the transpacific physiological research on the sea women (Ama in Japanese and  Haenyeo in Korean) and made the fishery workers the “primitive.” Finally, as a scholarly response to the COVID-19 crisis, now he is making an effort to create a research collective studying the making of “masked societies” in East Asia with other East Asian historians of science and STS scholars.