Na Sil Heo

Na Sil Heo is a historian of modern Korea, with research interests in studies of childhood, the cultural Cold War, race, and gender and sexuality. She is currently completing a book manuscript that examines childhood as a site of ideological and cultural formations in 1950s-1960s South Korea. Reading sources ranging from home floor plans and children’s literature to infant formula advertisements, her work reveals how Cold War liberalism manifested in various realms of childhood in postwar Korea.  She has published an article on gender and racial politics of infant feeding in postwar South Korea in Gender & History. She has also outlined a second book project which locates the history of family planning in Korea within transnational circulations of medical knowledge, contraceptives, and population control advocates. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto in 2020. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants, including the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Korean Collections Consortium of North America (KCCNA), and Dr. David Chu Scholarship in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Toronto. Before coming to Yale, she taught Korean history at the University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania.