Kim Lacey

Kim Lacey is a doctoral candidate in History at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Koreitsy: Soviet Koreans and Construction of Identity and Belonging” traces the movement of people from Korea to the RFE (and Central Asia) and examines their roles and place in the community. Lacey’s analysis breaks new ground by foregrounding the overlooked experiences of transnational migrants and studying the effects of gender, ethnicity, and class. Her research is based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Korea and Kazakhstan. She also uses songs and plays to supplement her sources and to delve deeper into particular trends and social/political significance they represent in the ordinary Soviet Koreans’ lives.

Her broader research interests include the histories of the Japanese Empire, the Russian Far East, and the Korean diaspora. Lacey contributed the book chapter “The ‘Remembered’ Sakhalin Koreans in the South Korean Press, 1946-1980,” in End of Empire Migrants in East Asia: Repatriates, Returnees and Finding Home, ed. Svetlana Paichadze and Jonathan Bull (Routledge, expected late-2022).

Lacey holds a BA in Eurasian and East European Studies from Bowdoin College and an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago. In 2020, she was awarded the Timberlake Prize by the Central Slavic Conference for the best graduate paper. She is the current Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Fellow, supported by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.