Boram Yi and Lisen Gottavall
Boram Yi is an Associate Professor of History and director of the history program at the University of Baltimore, a public university in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned her doctorate from the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on U.S.–East Asian relations and East Asian culture.
Her publications include “Prelude to Conflict, 1910–1948” in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Korean War, “‘An Alliance Forged in Blood’: The American Occupation of Korea, the Korean War, and the U.S.–South Korean Alliance,” published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, and “The Rise of Korean American Activism in Making Comfort Women Movement in the United States: Through the Activities of the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc.” in New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women: Comfort Women and What Remains.
She is currently completing a book manuscript on the development of the first Status of Forces Agreement between the United States and South Korea.
Lisen Gottvall is a senior at the University of Baltimore majoring in psychology with a minor in history.
University of Baltimore
Session
In the area between Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus and Penn Station, the remnants of Baltimore’s unofficial Koreatown remain visible. A small number of Korean restaurants and shops continue to operate, even though the neighborhood was a vibrant Koreatown between the 1970s and the 1990s. This study asks what happened to Baltimore’s Koreatown and why its history has received little scholarly attention.
Because no systematic academic research exists on this topic, this project offers the first historical study of Baltimore’s Koreatown that grew after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. By examining its rise and decline, the study challenges the long-standing myth that the Baltimore 1968 riot caused an irreversible collapse of the city. The growth of a Korean immigrant corridor in the years after the uprising points instead to the significance of global migration in shaping and revitalizing urban spaces.
The history of Baltimore’s Koreatown also encourages a rethinking of how Asian immigration fits into broader narratives of U.S. immigration history. Rather than framing Korean migrants as a “model minority,” the study aligns their experiences with earlier nineteenth century European immigrant communities, revealing patterns of adaptation, entrepreneurship, and neighborhood formation that connect Baltimore to wider global movements.
By reconstructing this overlooked chapter of the city’s past, the project contributes to Asian American and Pacific Islander studies and highlights how global migration leaves lasting marks on local communities. It offers a lens for understanding global entanglement in a period marked both by cross-border movement and by rising skepticism toward globalization.