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About the Author: Cheehyung Harrison Kim (Hawai‘i at Mānoa) Cheehyung Harrison Kim is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His research and teaching focus on socialism, labor, industrialism, everyday life, and urbanism in the context of East Asia and North Korea. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin and graduate studies at Columbia University. Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953-1961 (Columbia University Press, 2018) is his first book. He is currently writing a transnational history of architecture and urbanization in North Korea.

About the Book: Heroes and Toilers: Work and Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953-1961 In search of national unity and bureaucratic order in the decade following the Korean War, the North Korean state turned to labor. Even more than coercion or violence, work was crucial to state control. Industrial labor was both mode of production and mode of governance, characterized by repetitive work, mass mobilization, labor heroes, and the insistence on convergence between living and working. At the same time, workers challenged and reconfigured state power to accommodate their circumstances—coming late to work, switching jobs, and fighting with bosses, as well as following approved paths to secure their livelihood, resolve conflict, and find happiness. Heroes and Toilers is a study of postwar North Korea that avoids the pitfalls of exoticism and exceptionalism to offer a new answer to the fundamental question of North Korea’s historical development.

Please contact icks@snu.ac.kr (Tel. 02-880-9378) for more information.