Kim Lacey

Kim Yehbohn Lacey is a doctoral candidate in History at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation, titled “Koreitsy: Koreans in the Former Soviet Republics, 1863-Present,” traces the history of ethnic Koreans who crossed the border into the Russian Far East, a region that soon became a contested frontier between the expanding Russian and Japanese empires. It follows their subsequent dispersal across Central Asia (and Eastern Europe) following Stalin’s mass deportations. Lacey examines their evolving sense of identity and belonging over time using a wide range of sources, such as songs, food, family collections, and oral history, in addition to archival materials. Her analysis breaks new ground by foregrounding the overlooked experiences of transnational migrants and studying the impact of gender, ethnicity, and class within the Russian and Soviet imperial projects. Her research is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Japan, the U.S., and South Korea.

Lacey’s broader research interests include the history of empires, transnational migration, and the borderlands of Northeast Asia, particularly the Russian Far East. Some of her recent works include “The ‘Remembered’ Sakhalin Koreans in the South Korean Press, 1946-1980,” in End of Empire Migrants in East Asia: Repatriates, Returnees and Finding Home (Routledge, 2023), and “Music as Historical Evidence: Oral Songs in the Lives of Koreitsy” in Peripheral Narratives and Knowledge Production in Soviet and Contemporary Central Asia, 1917-Present (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign IOPN, 2025). She was also awarded the Timberlake Prize by the Central Slavic Conference for the best doctoral paper.

Lacey holds a BA in Eurasian and East European Studies from Bowdoin College and an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago. She has won several major external grants, including the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, the Title VIII Research Award, the Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Korea Foundation Scholarship, and the Japan Foundation Fellowship. Lacey is the Graduate Student Fellow in Residence at the Center for the Humanities at WashU in Fall 2025.