Bio 

Professor Na Sil Heo teaches premodern and modern East Asian history and global history. She 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 and was a Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies and Lecturer in History at Yale University and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.  

Her research interests include studies of childhood, the Cold War, food, gender, and sexuality. Her first book (under review) examines ordinary Koreans’ approaches to childrearing in postwar Korea, showing 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 traces the multiple gendered meanings and experiences of dairy consumption and production in 1960s-1970s South Korea at the intersection of animal studies, science and technology, and gender and sexuality.  

Selected Publications: 

“Good Housing for Good ‘Married Life’: Privacy, Anti-Communism, and Postwar Housing in Cold War South Korea,” in 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–60s,” in Gender & History 34, no. 1 (March 2022): 243–262. 

Recent Courses: 

• Approaches to Global History  
• Childhood and Domesticity in East Asia  
• Cold War Koreas 
• Japan after 1800 
• Modern East Asia 

Education 

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