Ilnyun Kim
Ilnyun Kim received his PhD in history from The Ohio State University and is currently Assistant Professor of History at Ewha Womans University. He specializes in political, intellectual, and diplomatic history, with particular emphasis on Cold War-era exchanges among the United States, Western Europe, and East Asia. More recently, he has expanded his research into the history of medicine. His work has appeared in Diplomatic History, Modern Intellectual History, and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. He is currently completing his first monograph, which examines the connections between mid-twentieth-century American liberals and progressive forces around the world.
Ewha Womans University
Session
This panel examines a central paradox of modern world history: encounters, circulation, and mobility often produced not openness, but new boundaries of culture, politics, and economy. Spanning modern China, colonial India, the Burma–China borderlands, and late nineteenth-century Europe, the panel explores how ideas, religious practices, peoples, and commodities moved across regions while being translated, contested, and regulated in local settings. The papers show how foreign constitutional models in China were reinterpreted rather than simply adopted; how missionary networks in Mysore intensified cultural division even as they expanded contact; how American Protestant expansion reshaped minority identities across imperial borderlands; and how the circulation of American kerosene generated trade barriers through the language of risk and safety. Taken together, these presentations highlight how modern connectivity became a means of producing new forms of exclusion, differentiation, and boundary-making.