Sung Eun Kim Explores the Military Ties Between Korea and the U.S.

Sung Eun Kim is an historian of modern Korea whose scholarship examines how race and gender shaped the experiences of colonial soldiering, particularly at the intersection of Korean militarism and U.S. imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region. His research centers on the Korean Augmentation to the United States Army Soldier, or KATUSA. The program was created in 1950 at the outbreak of the Korean War to embed South Korean soldiers into U.S. Army units in the region. Remarkably, this form of conscription continues in South Korea.  

For Kim, an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), this hyper-focused analysis is also incredibly personal. After completing his masters in the United States, Kim returned to South Korea to serve in KATUSA as a translator.  

“My lived experience as a minority soldier in the multi-ethnic context of the U.S. military empire had definitely shaped the way I think critically about diversity and inclusion,” he admits. “Rather than treating these concepts as institutional buzzwords, I want to explore how they can be transformative, especially within the U.S. military presence in Korea.” 

Building on that perspective, Kim is currently working on a book manuscript, “Augmenting Empire: Race, Gender, and the Making of KATUSA under U.S. Military Empire, 1945-2021,” that positions Korean conscription as a key lens to understand U.S.-Korean relations as fundamentally colonial. His research reveals how Koreans, both on the peninsula and in the diaspora, are enmeshed in militarized structures of race, gender and sexuality.   

Kim has meticulously analyzed Korean cultural writings — memoirs, poems, biographies and novels — from the 1940s through the 2010s. By placing these texts alongside U.S. state and military archives, his approach challenges conventional historical practices that risk reproducing racial and colonial representations, or what he terms the “coloniality of state archives.” Reading against the grain, Kim reveals how KATUSAs emerged not merely as auxiliaries to the U.S. military, but as agents of neocolonial and sub-imperial formations within Korea and across the militarized Pacific. 

“Since the Korean War, these South Korean soldiers have served in American uniforms, and while official narratives often celebrate them as symbols of racial integration and alliance, I focus on their racialization and emasculation as the hidden underside of American imperial power.” 

Kim envisions this book project as a way to redraw the boundaries between conventional Korean and American histories, pushing beyond national frameworks to deepen and expand fields such as critical militarization studies, emergent gender approaches and Asian American and ethnic studies. 

Drawing from the same impulse that animates his research, Kim brings this vision into the classroom. His goal is to foster a learning environment where students can connect their own lived experiences to larger historical and social structures through a critical lens. “I want students to question the social relationships and structures they are part of, rather than taking them for granted. By critically examining their own experiences, they learn to connect personal realities to broader systems of power.”