ANNOUNCEMENT:
The 2025 Winner of The UC Berkeley Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies
The Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley is honored to announce the 2025 winner of the UC Berkeley Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies: Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2023), by Professor Suzy Kim (Rutgers).
In Among Women across Worlds, Professor Kim builds upon her previous work on the North Korean revolution with a more explicitly feminist study of North Korean women and their transnational associations within the socialist world in the first decades of the North Korean state. Kim opens up a time when North Korean women actively forged new connections, represented their new state in international spaces, and contested the definition of peace and justice in these transnational spaces as much as within North Korea itself. The result is a rigorous excavation of emancipatory feminist solidarities in Korea’s twentieth century, revealing how Korean women in the Eastern bloc during the first half of the Cold War advanced ideals such as “women’s rights are human rights” in ways rarely appreciated by Western-centered historiographies. Kim’s retrieval of these little-known historical relationships that speak as urgently to the question of peace and justice in our own times, as they did in the era she is writing about, demonstrates the power and potential of historical writing in exploring a past that can still speak to our present.
The UC Berkeley Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies and its $10,000 prize were created to support groundbreaking research and writing that seeks to further the field of Korean Studies. A ceremony to celebrate the award and Professor Kim’s academic accomplishment will be held at UC Berkeley on Thursday, March 5, 2026.
The Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley is deeply grateful to all of the authors and publishers who participated in this year’s competition. We will soon make a separate announcement launching next year’s competition, which will be open to submissions of Korean Studies books published in 2024 and 2025.