Russell Burge

Russell Burge is a historian of modern Korea. His dissertation, “The Promised Republic: Developmental Society and the Making of Modern Seoul,” examined urbanization and social change in 1960s and 1970s South Korea. While at Yale he will develop this project into a book manuscript, part of a larger intellectual project of de-centering the bureaucrats and industrialists who have anchored our histories of East Asian development and focusing on questions of urban subalternity, access to the city, and the contentious politics of development. Burge’s other intellectual interests include the history of decolonization in East Asia, the Korean War, and the global proliferation of rock music. Burge received a B.A. in Art History from UCLA in 2007, an A.M. in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard in 2013, and a Ph.D. in History from Stanford in 2019. In Fall 2019, he will teach the course “The Two Koreas: North and South Korea in Historical Perspective.”