New Mexico, 2015
Kevin Y. Kim
I am a historian and writer, based in Los Angeles.
My work seeks to grasp how U.S. and global power and culture work in the national and international arenas. I like to decenter and interrogate familiar, comfortable notions of our personal and larger selves, posing modern life as I see it: a collage of converging and colliding human aspirations.
Academic history is actually my third career as a writer. In former lives, I have been a poet and journalist. As a historian and public intellectual, I find temporality fascinating. Touched by history’s underappreciated power, I am moved by the meaning of things in their temporal context: from things as seemingly timeless as love and morality to others as endlessly vexing as war, politics, and society.
But in many ways, my work as a writer strives along the same lines. Intervention and expression. Provocation and, hopefully, transformation.
Whether in academe, media, or public outlets, I embrace writing as my craft—a craft of thinking and rethinking, writing and rewriting, both self-conscious and often invisible collaboration. We stand among giants.
Some Accolades and Awards:
Faculty Fellowship, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University.
William Appleman Williams Junior Faculty Grant, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History, John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress and the American Historical Association.
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for the United States and the Cold War, New York University.
Fellowship, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Finalist, Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize, Society of American Historians.
Centennial Teaching Award, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University.