
- tahenry@ucsd.edu
- (858) 822-4012
-
9500 Gilman Dr
Department of History
Mail Code: 0104
La Jolla , California 92093
Todd A. Henry (Ph.D., UCLA, 2006; Assistant/Associate Professor, UCSD, 2009-Present) is a specialist of modern Korea with a focus on the period of Japanese rule (1910-1945) and its postcolonial afterlives (1945-present). A social and cultural historian interested in global forces that (re) produce lived spaces, he also 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 embodied experiences of heteropatriarchal capitalism. 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 (see “publications” tab for details).
Currently, Dr. Henry is at work on several new books and other creative work, including two books (Profits of Queerness: Media, Medicine, and Citizenship in Hetero-Authoritarian South Korea, 1950-1980; and Between Freedom and Death: South Korean Human Rights in a Global Era of HIV/AIDS and Gender Confirmation, 1980-2000) and a 30-minute documentary on the history of gay sociality (“Paradise,” 2023) with Minki Hong, all of which center understudied, “queer” dimensions of capitalist development in (post-) authoritarian South Korea. These interdisciplinary projects explore the ideological functions and subcultural dynamics of non-normative 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 HIV/AIDS. A piece of this research appears in his edited volume, Queer Korea (Duke University Press, 2020; Korean translation, 2023). Another forthcoming book, 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 United States.
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 Hawai’i, 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.
Six-Part Series on Q[ueer] Planet, South Korean LGBTI YouTube Channel (2019)
NPR Interview about COVID-19 and LGBTQ South Koreans (May 22, 2020)
Queer Korea Book Launch (June 1, 2020)
Podcast on “Sexuality, Relationships and a History of Queer Korea” (September 25, 2020)
Forum on Academic Denialism, Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (March 12, 2021)
KORUM (Harvard University Korean Student Organization) discussion about _Queer Korea_, Advocacy, and Social Justice (May 15, 2021)
Korea Society Talk on “Queerness” as an Embodied and Critical Approach to Korean Studies (May 10, 2022)
‘Paradise’ Spotlights Seoul’s Disappearing Queer Hubs,” The Korea Times, November 6, 2023: 14
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/11/113_361826.htmlBooks
Films
2023-2024 Screenings: Jeonju International Film Festival, Korea Queer Film Festival,
Cinema Diverse: The Palm Springs LGBTQ Film Festival, San Diego Asian Film
Festival, Boston LGBTQ+ Film Festival, Stockholm City Festival, Stamped Film
Festival [Pensacola], Make the Road: Queer East Asia, Generations Connect [Tokyo],
Tel Aviv International LGBT Film Festival, East London LGBTQ+ Film Festival
Awards: Special Jury Award (2023 Korean International Short Film Festival), and
Honorable Mention (2023 Merced Queer Film Festival)
Articles
Book Reviews
Translations
Another book project explores the cross-cutting role that the Japanese and Western imperialisms played in the post-WWII imagination of queer desires and practices of male homosexuality and other forms of queerness in Asia-Pacific. In an effort to re-center the trans-war, trans-national, and trans-ethnic dimensions of queer cultures in this region, Imperial Collisions focuses, in part, on two related discourses that, although appearing prominently in Japan’s homosexual press during the 1970s and 1980s, have received relatively little attention in a field that continues to approach the archipelago in national isolation or only in its bilateral relations with the US. The first discourse that problematizes this Cold War epistemology is evidenced by the many authors who homo-eroticized the drudgery and violence of prewar soldiering in a demilitarized Japan. The first part of Imperial Collisions pays special attention to the intrusive practice of penile inspections (maraken), an erotically charged part of physical examinations used to determine one’s fitness for soldiering. The second trans-war, trans-national, and trans-racial discourse is closely related to the postwar eroticization of military service in Asia-Pacific. This part of Imperial Collisions examines contemporaneous accounts that encouraged Japanese men to return to the many urban centers of its former empire – not as war mongering soldiers or colonial officials, but as middle-class businessmen engaged in sex tourism. Building on feminist critiques of heterosexual liaisons in the ongoing subordination of lower-class women, one chapter shows how inter-ethnic encounters between adult men developed in tandem with “courtesan” (kisaneg) tourism, a post-colonial form of sex work that re-established an unequal system of transactions facilitating the Japanese consumption of Korean bodies. This chapter suggests how gay encounters between Japanese and South Korean men indexed nationalist anxieties surrounding the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Taken together, these two discourses underscore how the Korean peninsula and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region played a central role in the formation of gay desires among postwar Japanese men. These trans-war, trans-national, and trans-ethnic discourses also connected a recent past of violence and instability to a more prosperous, if still unstable, present/future.