Biography

Na Sil Heo teaches East Asian history and global history and has also offered a Maymester course in South Korea. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto in 2020. She previously served as a postdoctoral associate in East Asian Studies and lecturer in History at Yale University and as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her research interests include childhood, the Cold War, food, gender and sexuality. Her first book, Raising Korea’s Children: Cold War Liberalism and Decolonization in Postwar South Korea (Stanford University Press, 2027), examines ordinary Koreans’ approaches to childrearing in postwar Korea. It shows how childhood became a central site for reconstructing the nation on the basis of Cold War liberalism in the aftermath of the Korean War.

Her second book project, Foreign Cows, National Milk: A Gendered History of South Korea’s Dairy Industry, traces the gendered meanings and experiences of dairy consumption and production in South Korea during the 1960s and 1970s. The project brings together animal studies, science and technology, and gender and sexuality.

Selected Publications

• Raising Korea’s Children: Cold War Liberalism and Decolonization in Postwar South Korea. Stanford University Press, 2027.
• “Good Housing for Good ‘Married Life’: Privacy, Transnational Anti-Communism, and Postwar Housing in South Korea”. The Journal of Asian Studies 81, no. 3 (August 2022): 459–474.
• “Racialising Baby Boys: Racial and Gender Politics in Infant Formula Advertisements in Cold War Korea, 1950s–1960s”. Gender & History 34, no. 1 (March 2022): 243–262.

Recent Courses

• Approaches to Global History
• Childhood and Domesticity in East Asia
• Cold War Koreas
• Introduction to East Asian Civilization
• Japan after 1800
• Modern East Asia
• Taste and Power in East Asia

Education

• B.A., Hawaii Pacific University
• M.A., George Washington University
• Ph.D., University of Toronto