Young-Sun Hong

I was born and raised in Korea. Having grown up under a military dictatorship, I was interested in German history because I believed that a deeper knowledge of the history of that country--one that the South Korean government constantly held up as the model of a hard-working people prospering under the leadership of a benevolent patriarch--held the key to understanding the authoritarian political culture of my own country. Although my understanding of German history changed when I began my doctoral work at the University of Michigan in 1982, I retained my original interest in questions of political culture and state-society relations. My first book, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State (Princeton University Press, 1998), focused on the social, ideological and political conflicts that drove the formation of the German welfare system and how they could be seen as a microcosm of the larger conflicts that were (de)forming the sphere of public discourse and political life. My more recent "Neither Singular Nor Alternative: Narratives of Welfare and Modernity in Germany, 1870-1945," which appeared in Social History (May 2005), extended the arguments that I developed there by addressing the theoretical and moral questions involved in the recent debate over the modernity of Nazi society and whether or not it can be characterized as a ‘welfare' state.I have been teaching at SUNY Stony Brook since 1993. In 1996-97 I taught at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. There I had a first-hand opportunity to observe the complex impact of globalization on Korean economy and society. This experience rekindled my original interest in the entangled histories of Europe and the Third World. Also new work in the fields of postcolonial, global, and transnational studies enabled me to better articulate the research questions that interested me and led me to enlarge the geographical scope of my research.
 

Education

B.A. (1979) History, Yonsei University, Korea; M.A. (1982 ) History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Ph.D. (1989) History, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
 

Experience

Associate Professor of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1998-present
Assistant Professor of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook 2003-04
Residential Fellow, International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University
Present Book Review Editor, Social History, 1998-present
Assistant Professor of History, California State University at Fullerton
 

Expertise

German history; Transnationalism, Cold War and Decolonization, Medical Aid, Korea